How to Increase Your Brand's Physical Availability

What is Physical Availability?

Physical availability means that your brand must be easy to find and easy to buy for those who want to purchase it right now. Being easy to find means your brand is sold where people physically or digitally are when they decide to buy, and that it is highly visible in those channels. The fewer the barriers to making a purchase, the easier it is to buy. Physical availability can be broken down into three areas: distribution, visibility, and portfolio.

Distribution
We need to have distribution in sales channels where purchases are or can be made. Without distribution in a sales channel, it’s neither possible to find nor buy our brand in that channel.

Visibility
While distribution is crucial, presence alone isn’t enough to ensure strong physical availability. We also need to be visible in the sales channels we are present in. If we aren’t visible, it’s not easy to find us, and we risk losing sales to competitors with better visibility.

Portfolio
People are different, and even the same buyer can have different needs when purchasing from the category. Therefore, we must have a portfolio that meets various needs by offering different variants, price points, or package sizes. For example, if Coca-Cola only sold 1.5L bottles, they would miss out on many sales. Hence, they also have variants like 0.33L cans, 0.5L bottles, and 4-packs in their portfolio.

How we get control over the brand's physical availability

Distribution 

To gain control over our brand's distribution, we must answer the overarching question: How broad and deep is our brand's distribution?

• Physical Stores: For instance, in grocery stores, we should use "Total Distribution Points" (TDP) to assess our distribution. TDP considers both the number of products a brand sells (depth) and the number of stores that sell these products (breadth). We should analyze TDP both at an overall grocery level and break it down by chain to identify significant differences across chains. We should also assess our distribution in other channels such as kiosks, retirement homes or cafeterias. 

• Retailers: Retailers must know the number of stores they have and the number of people living nearby or passing by these stores.

• Digital Channels: We should start by identifying relevant channels for our category, such as our own website or app, third-party retailers like Amazon, or review sites like Prisjakt. We need to know which channels we are present in, the share of revenue or traffic we get from these channels, and if we have any obvious gaps in our distribution.

Regardless of the sales channels we are in, we must understand our distribution relative to competitors, its development over time, and whether we have a fair share of distribution compared to sales. For a comprehensive understanding of the brand’s strengths and weaknesses, we should also examine distribution against other key metrics such as mental marketshare, penetration and sales volume.

Visibility

The overarching question regarding our visibility we must answer is: How visible is our brand in the channels where we have distribution?

• Distinctive Brand Assets: These are crucial for brands that want to be noticed in sales channels. If we haven’t measured the strength of our brand assets, we must start with a benchmark. If we have, we should set goals and a strategy for their use based on best practices. Repeating measurements over time will help us see how well we succeed. Effective use of distinctive brand assets in advertising can also significantly impact our brand identification and help us get more out of our marketing budget.

• Physical Stores: In physical stores, we need to control our share of shelf space and shelf quality. How much shelf space do we have compared to competitors? What is the quality of our placement? How has this evolved over time? Are there significant differences between similar chains?

• Digital Channels: In digital channels, we need to control our visibility. Google is the most crucial channel, where we should investigate our “Share of branded search” and “Share of buyer intent search.” The former shows how visible we are for searches on our brand name compared to competitors, while the latter shows how visible we are for the most important search terms in the category.

Portfolio

Regarding our portfolio, we must answer: How relevant is our portfolio to the needs of category buyers, and does our portfolio have any obvious areas for improvement?

• Portfolio Analysis: We should conduct a portfolio analysis where we look at:

• The number of products we have compared to our competitors and sales volume.

• The contribution of our different products to total revenue.

• The distribution and visibility of our bestsellers.

• Significant problems with the tail of our portfolio

• The necessity of launching new products.

• Any obvious gaps in our portfolio that require new launches

Think broadly about potential barriers that make it harder to find and buy from us

While we must have good control on our distribution, visibility, and portfolio, we should also think broadly about potential barriers that make it difficult for people to find and buy our brand. For example, to be truly easy to buy, we should offer a wide range of payment and credit options. A concrete example of removing barriers is the British supermarket chain Sainsbury. During Christmas 2010, the UK had unusually heavy snowfall. By using 12,000 tons of salt on their parking lots, Sainsbury made it easier to shop there than at other chains that were slow with snow clearing. As a result, Sainsbury saw significant increases in market share and surpassed Asda to become the second-largest supermarket chain in the UK.

Would you like to know more about physical availability?

Please feel free to email us any questions you might have or get in touch to set up an informal chat about how your business can accelerate growth.