Finding Clarity: A Hybrid Approach to Market Size and Share Analysis

Clarity on both the size of the market and market share is critical to developing a successful growth strategy in the commercial world. However, if you are working with fragmented data from various sources, having little or inaccurate information about the size of the prize and your market share, it becomes extremely challenging to form a full picture of your market, your key competitors, and threats from new entrants.

It’s like you are flying blind. While internal sales data provides valuable information, without context on how the rest of the market is performing, there could be significant value left on the table or burgeoning opportunities missed. 

The Blind Spots of Incomplete Data

To have a highly actionable data insights program in place, market size and share must be tracked on a regular basis, be it monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your business. This allows for measurement of changes and strategic impact over time, i.e., are you growing or losing market share within a particular market segment?

This also provides the ability to spot competitive market share changes early. For instance, are there increasing threats in your core categories by innovative and agile players? With these pivotal insights in hand, you then can identify the source of the threat(s) and diagnose the reasons for the rapid share shifts – be those driven by price, promotion, trade, tariff or innovation.

The Value of Regular Market Tracking

In many Southeast Asia countries, there is often no off-the-shelf data available for many types of categories to understand these foundational metrics, which makes tracking on a regular basis challenging. This is particularly true for categories that have no point of sales or limited panel data tracking, such as B2B categories or limited retail channels such as specialist Toys, Video Games or Foodservice.

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Outsourcing, In-House or Hybrid: The Right Model for You

When it comes to determining whether outsourcing the entire process or handling the market sizing work in-house, there are several key elements for organizations to consider:

1. Cost: Outsourcing the process to consultants or research companies requires external costs, yet there are certainly benefits from a capability and experience perspective. While in-house there are often resource constraints and potential team structure decisions that may be involved, and it may not be practical to conduct market interviews with customers in the category without external support from a qualified data provider. This is where hybrid models can make a lot of sense, outsourcing much of the labour-intensive data-collection work, while leveraging in-house talent for the knowledge-work components (e.g. analytics model building) so the time saved could be spent on what matters more to the business. 

“If the business has the resources available, a hybrid model may be the best balance of cost and effort, as well as the most risk-averse long-term solution.”

2. Longevity: Whether building an in-house insights team or outsourcing market research needs to an external partner will require certain groundwork for the first year but once systems and processes are established, subsequent tracking measurement efficiency will increase exponentially; reducing reliance on outside sources as well as external costs. 

3. Ownership: Full outsourcing presents additional risks beyond cost and longevity – given there is a substantial amount of work involved in estimating the market size and share models that are specific to the category, country, culture and context. Any shortcuts in building these models would be of great interest to other players / competitors in the industry. Internal protection of the methodologies and models can be critical to maintaining competitive advantage over the long-term. A “black-box” approach with limited access by external consultancies is best-practice to support security requirements. 

“Options to establish a market sizing framework vary widely, and should ideally be tailored to the category, country, culture and context.”

Hybrid Approach Benefits: In-House Expertise, External Data Power 

Handling the knowledge work in-house while leveraging a reliable data provider to recruit customers as survey panelists, conduct interviews and collect high-quality, validated data is one possible hybrid solution. However, it does rely on having sufficient internal resources   across your data science, analytics and insights divisions – and those individuals should have market sizing specific experience and expertise to know how to both implement the data and action the results with in-market/ local teams within the organization.

The benefit of this solution is that the model remains internal, with minimal additional costs providing the team structure is in place for the functions and in-house efforts required. With the self-discipline of focusing only on the highly practical aspects of the process such as survey design and data collection, it is possible for teams to ensure longevity through building a customer-led, data-centric culture around strategic brand planning.

The Right Partner: Essential for Market Sizing Success

A highly experienced and flexible data provider should be sought out for any organization engaging in market sizing for an end user business, as given there will be significant variability by category, country, culture and context not to mention there is unlikely to be a fully cookie-cutter style survey design available.

It is not only key to hire an experienced panel or data provider with market sizing survey design expertise to manage the project, but also to allow time and flexibility to pilot several iterations of the design. This will ensure the value and volume data collected is as accurate to the true market situation as possible, resulting in high-quality data being incorporated into the model that your branding or marketing strategy is built on.

Having access to regular, accurate insights on market share is a distinct competitive advantage: don’t be put off by the potential set up efforts or costs. It could be as simple as finding a well-trusted provider who has knowledgeable teams and offers a good range of support models so they could do all the groundwork for you at the start.

When all is running smoothly, you could switch to a more automated model which gives you the autonomy, yet frees you up with valuable time to look after things that matter to you most. Thanks to the vast choices and competitions, the initial setup and ongoing rates could be a lot more affordable than you imagine.