Consumer demand strategy and sourcing

One of the world's largest candle and fragrance companies was reconsidering its business model in Asia. For many years, the company outsourced sales, marketing, and distribution to a master distributor, dropping goods in Hong Kong and basically letting the local teams manage the brand. Given the growth in consumer demand as well as the dynamic and more attractive nature of the target segments, the company decided to rethink how and if to approach the many different markets in Asia.

Alaris was hired to develop a robust understanding of customers, competitors and channel partners. Some of the questions we strove to answer included:

• What is the size of the market?

• What types of consumers purchase these products?

• Where do they purchase them and what is the buying journey?

• Are they satisfied with the products and what gaps could we fill?

• Who are potential channel partners?

• What is the right mix of online and offline marketing and sales?

• How can we get the most out of the current distributor and who else should we consider partnering with?

• What is the cost structure for operations in each market, including changing to local suppliers?

• Who are the competitors and what are their strategies?

In short, we need to know where to play and how to win.

Alaris started by running a national quantitative and qualitative study to define the consumers, understanding and defining who they were, what they wanted and what prices they were willing to pay in which channels. We combined this with market sizing. And finally built operating and financial models that reflected the types of structures that could be implemented with the screened channel partners.