David Berry: "Innovation in OOH has been really strong"

In this latest edition of Perspectives, we hear from David Berry, Managing Director of Kantar Worldpanel Ireland, on the state of Irish FMCG. Following some challenging recession years for Ireland, we asked him how the economy in general had performed since, what this meant for retail and where growth was likely to come from in the future.

“The economy has bounced back from the recession and we have seen strong growth in recent years. The retail market within this has also performed well. Consumers are starting to feel more confident and are willing to spend a bit more money as a result.”

David Berry went on to explain that the market can really be viewed in two sections, the first is the supermarkets which have enjoyed reasonably strong growth of +2% over the last two years. Value remains very important for this sector and competition is strong which does limit growth to some extent. The second section is the Out of Home market (OOH):

“Where we have seen stronger growth is in Out of Home performance.”

As a result of some very strong innovation in recent times, consumers have responded well to the new products available and so are spending more in this sector.

“Innovation within Out of Home has been really really strong."

Considering where growth was going to come from in the future, David Berry believed that the very strong innovation by the OOH channel leading to new brands and solutions was creating a response from the supermarkets who were dedicating more space to OOH within their stores.

“A lot of the growth in the next few years will be following the consumer in that on-the-go consumption.”

In conclusion, for brands to best position themselves for growth in the future they need to focus on offering customers something new and different to stand out from the crowd:

“In a market that is competitive with more focus on own-brand, brands that can offer something new to consumers are the ones that will really manage to succeed and grow their sales”.

Watch the full interview by clicking on the video above.

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