When you’re a growing retailer, it’s tempting to choose retail locations that are distant from one another to avoid negatively impacting your sister stores in the market.  However, this strategy for analyzing retail sites can leave gaps in the market that put you at risk of a competitive entry or worse, leave dollars on the table when you could have had three stores in the market instead of two.  The goal, then, is to plan a network that maximizes your market share without overly cannibalizing your own sales. 

Growing retailers look to expand into markets where concentrations of their target consumers live, work or shop. A consumer’s lifestyle and life stage often define their preferences and behavior, and few factors better determine one’s lifestyle than education level. For this study, we wanted understand which markets were seeing an increase in education levels. To measure this, we looked at the change in the percentage of persons over age 25 that had no bachelor’s or master’s degree in 2013 compared to 2018.  We also controlled for increases in bachelor’s degrees at the expense of master’s degrees, e.g. markets where the percentage of bachelor’s degrees increased while the percent of master’s degrees decreased.  

When a retail or service business chooses to expand their reach through franchising, acquisition or organic growth, a critical question that arises is, “How do we replicate our success?”  The answer for most? Adopt a site selection process and use mapping and analysis software that will provide your company’s decision-makers with the facts they need to make educated site decisions.

If you’re a franchise organization, you know well how important it is to understand the markets into which you are expanding so you can maximize your potential and increase sales. Too often, franchise concepts come to us when they have 20 franchised locations when it would have been better to implement a consistent strategy from the start. While the shotgun approach to franchise expansion might not cause problems for a while, developing a territory plan before you sell more franchises will ensure that you don’t limit your overall capacity for growth. In other words, taking a smart approach to franchise development will allow you to sell more successful franchises in the long run.