We believe that markets and in particular emerging markets can often be more clearly framed in terms of city markets rather than countries. It’s a tricky business identifying and prioritising consumer markets in geographically large, populous and disparate emerging markets, where locating pockets of consumers in cities above threshold wealth bands is key. Sparse data makes accurate strategy setting difficult... and operationally, should one consider a city, a metropolitan area or a broader demand catchment? How can these be defined from a supply and demand perspective?

We work with consumer goods companies and retailers to develop international expansion strategies which more than ever focus on emerging markets. We have developed proprietary global country and city databases and forecasting models of demographic, economic, demand proxy and wealth banding data. Our city expertise, also founded in our work in the urban economics realm, enables us to help our clients in:

• Sizing relevant emerging urban market demand for specific categories
• Identifying cities with un-tapped ‘latent’ demand indicators which could be supply-side driven
• Objectively comparing and quantifying metro demand across countries and continents
• Identifying which emerging (or developed) market city to enter next
• Sizing different wealth band markets pointing to price point innovation opportunities
• Allocating and prioritising resource (financial or human) to obtain distribution advantage where it matters in terms of demand potential and pockets/growth of relevant wealth (ie city wealth bands)
• Adapting the go-to-market strategy based on relative demand potential
• Understanding how categories evolve with wealth band development, leading to opportunities to proactively lead market development
• Assessing current performance relative to demand potential, identifying key sources of upside potential in existing city markets

We would welcome the opportunity to discuss how our expertise can support market-differentiating decisions for your business.