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Food & Beverage

Rapid urbanization, fierce competition, and changes in consumer behavior have increased challenges for retailers.

Over the past 20 years in Asia there have been three general market shifts: rapid urbanization, fierce competition, and a huge change in consumer behavior. These have resulted in increasingly difficult operating environments, and thus the failure of many brands to succeed in China, India, and Southeast Asia. In order to efficiently and safely grow your retail brand in Asia today, you have to be more savvy and aware of these challenges, and how to evolve with them.

Fortunately, market problems that plague retailers have remedies that help to lower the cost of operations, save time, and reduce the risk of poor investments. The solution to these problems is centered around map-enabled market data for better strategic planning and operations. Leveraging this geospatial data, your organization, both within and outside of Asia, can have access to powerful tools and services that can put your brand ahead of the competition.

Common Problems

Accelerated growth in Asian markets has caused serious hurdles for retail operations. Reducing the cost and risk of operations in these markets requires considerable insight.

Expensive & Scarce Real Estate — One of the biggest problems is the fact that quality real estate meeting your business needs is often very difficult to find or very costly. This is due to the fact that rapid growth has lead to an increase in competition, which has inflated prices. For prime real estate, you’ll often end up in a bidding war with competitors, driving prices up further. Good sites get snatched up very quickly, so your time to validate new sites needs to be fast to prevent a lost opportunity.

Urgency to move quickly on real estate creates a rushed approval process, without the proper analysis to support. It also sabotages the success of a viable development pipeline.

Complicated Assortment Planning — The root of many of the problems faced by retailers is the lack of quality market data to make more informed decisions. Without a good understanding of an area in terms of its population (daytime population, household number, wealth segmentation, etc), it’s hard to determine the right products for the area. Planners use a guess and check system based on what is doing well, and what is not. This creates wasted time and resources used to tune product mixes based on the performance over time.

A better approach is needed, and is heavily reliant on map-enabled data to understand areas based on the consumers that live, shop, and work there.

Difficult Strategic Expansion Planning — Without readily available market data, it’s difficult for development teams use a macro-perspective and strategically create a plan to gain more market share. Without market data (demographic segmentation of populations, along with business points of interest), it’s very difficult to determine the size of a market and estimate potential.

Tracking competition adds an additional layer of complexity, since competing brands open/move/close retail locations frequently. Solving these challenges requires market data at macro and micro-levels to gain insight. Tools and services that consume this data are needed to provide meaningful output to gain additional clarity, and help expansion teams make better decisions.

Hard to Map Customer Information — There’s no doubt mapping consumers can empower your business units with powerful information needed to support sales, marketing, and expansion planning. The tools and processes to map consumers are regularly available in western countries; however there is a lack of support for retailers operating in Asia.

Map-Enabled Market Data
  • Demographic Segmentation
    Target customer profiling with total and daytime pop, households, and wealth.
  • Retail Indicators
    Key retail drivers such as accessibility, shopping centers, and major brands.
  • Key Competitors
    Every major retail food and beverage competitor mapped to a point.
Web-Based Software — Kiwi
Consulting Services

Solutions

By utilizing map-enabled data and tools, and combining that with your store or market performance data, your business units can make better expansion and operation decisions in emerging markets.

Market Data — Our data consists of segmented demographics, retail points of interest, brand tracking info, and heat maps. We create 1KM2 - 500M2 grids that define different demographic segments of a market. We also track and maintain thousands of geo-coded point data, including major retail brands. The data can be plugged into business intelligence tools with geographic extensions.

Software — Kiwi is data visualization software we developed using ESRI technology to gain business and market insight for better validation, communication, and discovery. It's a GIS-enabled tool that provides instant access to digital maps and geo-spatial data through a Web portal. It can be used to increase the speed of site selection and better the internal process of asset management.

Consulting Services — Our consulting team is composed of business and technical analysts who fundamentally understand the importance of demographic and market data to brands operating in Asia. This data, when combined and analyzed against traditional business data, highlights areas of a market where growth potential is high, brand presence is under-penetrated, and market gaps are the greatest.