Staples - Market Potential

Using drive time analysis and competitor location mapping to ascertain the market potential of Staples store locations.

Staples offers a broad range of stationery products and services, ranging from ‘big ticket’ items such as furniture and PCs, to paper and print supplies. With no insight, it was impossible to accurately predict the market potential of its customer base.

The Challenge
Accurately assessing the market potential of each of its store locations was a challenge Staples UK was keen to overcome, in order to facilitate business and marketing planning. Staples turned to Response One to provide analytical insight that would enable the efficient evaluation of the ongoing potential of each of its stores, as well as the ability to be able to rank potential locations for new stores – both of which were identified as key drivers for growth.

The Solution
Taking Staples’ customer data for both business and non-business customers, we overlaid enhancement data in the form of  a B2B and B2C lifestyle universe to produce a matrix of Staples customers and store locations ranked against every UK postcode.
In a parallel project, Staples customers’ transactional data was analysed to produce a recency, frequency and monetary value (RFM) model, which enables customer value to be forecast over time. Taking this insight, we then plotted drive times of key customer segments from each Staples store location to ascertain the value of each potential store.
This geo-value customer data was then combined with the locations of competitor businesses which Staples was able to use to rank potential locations for new stores in order of likely revenue.

The Results
By incorporating this initial data Staples is now able to put in place initiatives to target underperforming stores and to take learnings from the best performing stores and apply them across the store network.