How to estimate the size of the bottled water market in France

Haha, funny! I actually did exactly that in a real case.

The approach is basically like any other market sizing question. A key aspect of bottled water markets is that you will need to understand that there actually different markets:

• The most intuitive one is the market for small bottles, let's say below 2 liters. Typical end customers are households and companies, public sector facilities, etc. that offer bottled water to their employees, etc.
• Another market on top is the market for 5 gallon canisters that you will often see in a B2B setting, often with a paper cup holder next to it. Offices, clinics, etc.

Given these two markets, you can split the work into a B2C market (small bottles, in-home or on the road consumption) and a B2B market. You can approach the first one building on population size and estimating consumption per day.

For the B2B market you'll need a bit more sophisticated approach, e.g. estimating the total number of clinics, offices, etc that are customers and then calculate the size from there.

Hope this helps to build the right approach.

Hi Valentine,

The best way to learn is by doing :) Post your approach here and we can provide feedback!

General Tips for Market Sizing

1. Just like in a case, make sure you understand the question - what are you really being asked to calculate
2. Decide whether a top-down or bottom-up approach is best
3. Figure out what you know you know, and what you know you don't know, but could estimate
   1. This helps you determine how to split out buckets
4. Stay flexible - you can start with a "high-level" market sizing, but gauge your interviewers reaction....if it looks like they want you to do more...then go along level deeper in terms of your splits

Bottled Wate Market

1. ​Population of France
2. Segment by income
3. Estimate # bottles consumed per day/week per group
4. Multiply out
5. Multiply by bottled water cost (2 euro)

Hello!

I would always recommend you to give it a shot and then post it here, this would help you the most.

This is a very typical market sizing case, where the key steps are:

• Calculate the total population
• Calculate the % of population that could be interested in this product (this could be done by clustering -the classical ones are age groups, purchaching power, etc.-)
• Calculate the % of the total adressable market that any firm in particular could have -in case it´s asked only-.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara