In demand, the intersection of context and consumer needs, part 3

Activating demand spaces for growth

One of the frustrations we hear from clients about demand spaces is that despite being a compelling conceptual framework for understanding the broad dynamics of a category, they can be difficult to activate.

Interestingly, this is both true and false at the same time. On the one hand, demand spaces are a strategic tool, designed for medium/long-term planning, rather than tactical campaigns or launches.

But good demand spaces should have multiple layers to them, enabling a wide range of different initiatives. Activity including portfolio planning, positioning and innovation can all benefit greatly from well-constructed demand spaces.  

The where and the how 

All good growth strategy answers two fundamental questions: where to play and how to win. You must have both a clear understanding of where the opportunity is and a plan for how you will unlock it.

Demand spaces are a hand-in-glove fit for answering the first of these two questions. In any given category or sector, they provide us with a map of where the consumer demand is. They help us to see the demand that underpins the category and identify spaces in which to participate.

And whilst all growth strategy needs to answer both the where and the how, some activities lean more heavily on answering one of these questions over the other.

For example, for portfolio strategy, it is critical to understand where the demand is located so you can best arrange your portfolio to capture as much as possible. It is no surprise that some of the most enthusiastic adopters of demand spaces are businesses with large portfolios of competing products eg Unilever, PepsiCo, Heineken, and Diageo. 

Demand Spaces can also be incredibly powerful for other where-based activities like positioning. The depth of understanding on who you are targeting, what you need to deliver, what you need to enter the consideration set, and how to differentiate, can provide an extremely tight brief for creative expression. By anchoring a positioning in a tightly defined demand space, successive creative iterations can build on each other to create a long-lasting and distinctive brand narrative, centred on a driver of consumer behaviour.

What about the ‘how’? 

Given that demand spaces naturally lend themselves to more where-based activities, it’s worth thinking about how we use them to answer the how? How do they give us the ingredients we need to make the strategy real and execute it?  

It’s a fair challenge, as one of the benefits of working with demand spaces is their bias toward fewer, bigger opportunities – to create scale. But when populating an innovation pipeline, we need focus; we need to break the demand spaces down into smaller, discrete pieces and explore the niches and nuances where the winning ideas are found. 

One of the ways to do this is to break each demand space down into a handful of ‘sticky’ and ‘springy’ growth platforms. When constructed well, these will evoke curiosity, inspire ownership, generate FOMO and be creatively rich and inviting. 

They will also answer the following brand and consumer questions: 

• What is the consumer problem we are solving? 
• What are the under-met consumer needs?  
• Where are categories/brands/products falling short of fully meeting expectations? 
• Where are needs being fulfilled by other categories, activities, or behaviours? 
• What are the points of parity needed to enter the consideration set? 
• What are the potential points of difference that will drive choice?  
• What is most valued and how do we make it visible? 

These growth platforms provide the connecting link between the demand space and the innovation jobs to be done. They help ensure that any new products or services are solving a big enough problem to achieve scale and provide the detail to increase their chances of success. 

Beyond ‘marketing’ 

The final opportunity to activate your demand spaces is by driving their adoption beyond insight and marketing. And it’s potentially the lowest hanging fruit of them all.  

Delivering for our customers takes more than just the marketing team. The whole organisation needs to share responsibility for being customer centric. When developed correctly, demand spaces can add tremendous value to this.

By using them to organise around the needs and behaviours of your customers, you can ensure that all organisational activities and resources are aligned against common opportunities. 

Much like how a who-based segmentation creates a common language across the business about whom you are targeting, cross-functional teams armed with demand spaces have a common language describing where growth will come from.  

When grounded in insight, sized appropriately and with an inspiring and stretchy vision of the future, driving wider take-up can be a very quick way to get more value from your demand spaces.

Read the fourth and final part of the series here.

Adam Rowles is a director at The Forge