There are hard indicators in the business world that we all use to make decisions. The queen of the crown is perhaps the Market Share to identify our size or growth within its total.
There are also other less common ones such as Voice Share, which would be how much my brand is seen, based on an estimate of advertising investment and installed product park, or Mindshare (Top of Mind), how quickly my brand appears in the user's mind when wanting to satisfy a need. In another order, but something widely used, is the Net Promoter Score that aims to measure the user's intention to recommend our brand.
There is no doubt why we use them and why many pay thousands of dollars for research that may provide clues to them.

But what is Wallet Share in a sector?
Perhaps again they associate it with the Market Share or the hard data of how much of the user's total spending goes to a brand, but this term contains a much deeper and more valuable concept that allows not only to make strategic decisions with a very high impact for the brand but also for the industry as a whole and is the basis of why certain projects were successful and inevitable in the digital world.

Forget the hard data, or how many washing machines and televisions you sell, but reflect on the chances that a consumer will always choose your brand for all their needs in a certain area.
Think for a moment about restaurants. It doesn't matter if my pizzeria is number one in pizza consumption, nor if they always come to my restaurant when they want pasta. There is no way that a customer's wallet, every time they decide to go to eat, will spend 100% of the time at your establishment.

The same thing happens in music and entertainment, even if you love a singer or style, a record company cannot expect you to only buy records from them, nor can a film producer expect you to only like their content.
Thus, we should not be surprised that applications like Rappi, Restorando, Spotify, Netflix or others have had the success they had, nor that brands make an effort to be there, and that, when the customer's wallet is so distributed, the millions invested in developing their own apps, websites and channels do not give the expected result for brands.
The two simple keys to understanding this phenomenon are: a) the view is from the reality of the user and not from the need of the brand; b) a brand or group cannot integrate the rest of the competition and that is why innovation comes from outside.

What is happening in the home products sector
Brands often analyze hard data such as their market share by product line - believe it or not - in the expensive reports available on outlets or even evaluate their NPS with little feedback from customers or after handling a complaint.
Although sales in retail, physical and/or digital, evidently multi-brand and multi-item, concentrate almost the entire market, leaving a small portion to direct channels; And, although retailers may believe that they manage to concentrate 100% of their client's wallet, this is not the case either because with the advent of the Internet it is possible to simply choose the best price regardless of the point of sale.

But the problem is not sales, the problem is not knowing the user, that is, who buys, repurchases, and the participation of a brand in their home. I'm not talking about statistics but about “Alicia” and “Brian”.
We could define investment in After Sales as low (3% in the best of cases), extemporaneous, reactive, inefficient and unproductive because although there is no doubt about the value of a loyal and better informed user, the effort to get to know them and manage to talk to them seems titanic and utopian, and where the investment in websites, apps, social networks and etc. end up on deaf ears.
That is why it is time to understand that the relationship with the user must evolve. We must understand that the user has more than 50 brands in their home and although their heart may have room for two or three, the cases and reasons in which they are linked to them are few.

The only efficient way to reach it is not by investing millions, but by offering them a unified space of value where it can be linked with ALL brands, with minimal effort, or, if we follow what we have learned to date in other industries, leave the construction of the common channel to others but let the brands be the owners of the message.
The great challenge is first to understand that the client does not belong to anyone, but to everyone, because your client is not only a professional user of carpentry tools, he is a family man who likes cooking and is also attracted to vintage. Their universe is much larger than the one the brand knows and therefore their problems as a whole are more than those they have with a particular brand.

All for one and one for all
With that clarity and that objective, Apptivalo was born, a unique after-sales channel designed from the user, who with minimal effort can save their invoices or follow the guarantees of any product regardless of the brand or the sales channel, receive alerts, find their manuals, see tips and more. An app where information on more than 10,000 current products on shelves and 2,500 technical services in the country already coexist.

But for associated brands, it is getting to know Alicia and Brian who in seconds activate their products in exchange for the benefits that a direct relationship with the brand can offer. One channel per product where each brand is the owner of the message, brings you spare parts, chats, gives specific benefits, and all the useful information you want, starting a relationship after the purchase instead of after the problems.

The final result will be greater loyalty to the brand, but with palpable benefits such as cost reduction in claims management, greater value of informative material, cost reduction in manuals and more, but it will also obtain hard but humanized data about the installed parks and with aggregated information about its user base, being valuable and unprecedented information for commercial links and strategies.
In conclusion, technology forces us to rethink and it is time for home product manufacturers to integrate and embrace it. It is time to fulfill the maxim of “putting the customer first”, something you can only do by getting to know them first.

By Rodolfo Andragnes, technologist and multi-entrepreneur
CEO of Apptivalo and President of the NGO Bitcoin Argentina