When setting a Strategic Plan, the most important Strategic Objective to state is in reference to your company’s market share. For example, “During the ensuing Financial Year XYZ company will be launching a growth strategy that will drive an increase in its market share in relation to the Chinese market from 0.3 % to 0.6 %, to be realised within the next two Financial Years.”

Market share is actually a quantifiable KPI. Over the years I have found that (in New Zealand) two useful pieces of data to apply in the calculation of ‘total market size’, to then calculate relative market share, can be found in the Statistics NZ website:

a) Household Economic Survey (HES) data tables.

b) Census data tables.

From the Census data tables we can ascertain what the ‘Total Number of Households’ is either in a particular region or in relation to the whole country. And from HES data tables we can glean Average Household Expenditure in relation to our product category of interest. 

With these two pieces of data, we can calculate the Total Market Size for the particular geography under consideration. For example, let’s say that we’re interested in understanding how big the market is for fashion clothing in the Wellington region. For argument’s sake (simply to illustrate using fictitious data), let’s say that the total number of households in this region = 100,000. Let’s also say that the HES tables reveal that household expenditure on fashion clothing for the 2017 – 2018 year was on average 5 % of Total Household Expenditure. Again using Household Economic Survey results we learn that Total Consumer Expenditure in the Wellington region for 2017 – 2018 was $25b.

Given the above facts, we can then proceed to perform the following calculation to reveal what the total size of the Wellington market is for fashion clothing…

100,000 households x (5 % x $25,000,000,000) = $1,250,000,000 per annum

Okay, so now that we know the TOTAL size of this market for the Wellington region, we now want to understand what share of this market our fashion clothing business presently has. And this is simply calculated by dividing the GST inclusive annual sales result of our business by the Total Market Size…

Let’s say that our GST sales turnover for the 2017 – 2018 Financial Year was $3,500,000. This would mean that the current market share of our business is: $3,500,000 divided by $1,250,000,000 = 0.3 %

Fully expressed we can say that currently our business has a 0.3 % share of the Wellington fashion clothing market. So now we have a known starting point to state in our Strategic Objective that concerns our aspiration to achieve greater market share.