Over the years, the issues of market maturity and saturation have been themes many of us have faced in discussions with retailers around listings for new products. We’ve worked out a simple way to get a quick handle on this, in the sense of consumer perceptions around momentum and choice, and have begun to build a category database. This is intended as a backdrop and support for our clients and contacts to use when they are investigating whether there is demand for a new product in their specific category.
To date, we’re seven categories in and the data is looking interesting. We can certainly see the proportion of the UK population in-market by category, notice demographic differences within these penetrations, and highlight which categories are under- or over-served, and growing or dwindling. We’ll publish a paper on this before Christmas, but in the meantime if you’d like to suggest a category for us to add, or you’d like an advance copy of the paper, either leave a comment below or get in touch via email.