While new and emerging concepts may be the lifeblood of the retail and restaurant industries, in today’s highly competitive retail environment, it’s incredibly difficult to flourish and stand out among well-established competitors.
When you’re ready to start growing your brand, you know exactly how important it is that each new location you open performs well because as an emerging concept, one costly mistake – such as opening up a poor performing location – could mean the death of your brand.
While we recently wrote about how to avoid opening those expensive misses with a proper site selection and location strategy, it can be even more challenging to choose which new market to enter first as your brand continues to expand.
With a constantly changing retail landscape, a staggering amount of competition and shifting consumer preferences, what should you be focusing on to ensure that you’re picking the right new markets for your brand’s growth?
The answer: focus on market knowledge so you can prioritize markets based on potential.
Impact of Market Knowledge
You probably know your home market better than anyone. But do you know the next town over? How about the next state over?
The answers, more than likely, come with decreasing confidence.
In order to swim instead of sink when diving into the deep end of expansion efforts, you need objective and quantifiable data in order to take swift and decisive action – just as you need it when deciding on your next site location.
Entering new markets requires a careful understanding of customer segments, regional preferences and site locations.
Find Your Customers, Find New Markets
Just as you combined customer insights with analytic technology to pinpoint where you should open a new unit based on concentrations of your best customers, apply the same logic when determining which market you should enter next.
Assess the level of competitive pressure with a market analysis and then use your customer profile to determine a market’s potential by evaluating whether or not people who look just like your core customers live there.
And when you find markets, and trade areas within those markets, with large concentrations of consumers that have the same characteristics as your best customers, you’ve discovered fertile ground for new locations.
From there, you can examine specific sites in order to identify the one nearest to the greatest number of potential customers.
The Bottom Line
Rather than entering a new market blindly, you can use customer data and analytics to understand the best trade areas for expansion so you can prioritize which markets to enter first.
Because at the end of the day, in a crowded, competitive environment, it’s more important than ever for emerging concepts to have a keen understanding of their customers and a precise definition of their market positions in order to optimize their expansion and stand out from the crowd.
If you’re having trouble deciding where to plant your brand’s flag next, let’s talk about how our Emerging Concept Solution can help you make that decision with confidence.
