Capture your market
The main obstacle to entering a new market is lack of knowledge
Success in a new market can bring transformational growth for a brand. But this tantalizing opportunity often appears out of reach: the market seems alien, difficult to penetrate, and far removed from the company’s core skill set.
The main obstacle is not the market itself, the capabilities of the company, or even its leaders’ appetite for change. It’s lack of knowledge. This leads to fear of risk – which in turn leads to missed opportunities.
Strategic Research first helps clients develop the knowledge, then identify the optimum path to success in penetrating new markets and gaining new sources of revenue.
Define your market
Whether entering a new market, or strengthening an existing position, it’s essential to understand your target market. How is the market defined? How large is it? What proportion can the brand or product reasonably access?
Defining a market may seem easy. At its most basic, a market is a combination of category size and target geographical reach.
Explore further, and new opportunities often emerge. For example, is the market for Coca-Cola simply soft drinks? Sometimes, people drink Coke because they want a boost of energy. Does this mean it can be considered part of an “energy products” market, alongside chocolate bars, and specialist drinks?
By considering these types of questions, and exploring them via qualitative studies assessing consumer choices in a range of situations, you can identify new market opportunities, determine the true size of your market, and maximize sales of your product.
Identify market segments and key targets
Segmentation studies scope out the areas of the market in which a brand or product can thrive.
Strategic Research’s approach is tailored to clients. We have two main approaches at our disposal:
- Canonic analysis, which is designed to identify individual groups distinguishable in terms of attitudes and behavior
- ©Cube analysis, which breaks the market down into segments of opportunities or consumption acts. It involves assessing the size of an opportunity situated at the crossroads of a target, a motivation and a moment of consumption.
Segmenting renders the vision of the market more complex. Therefore, one of the key challenges is to synthesize the collected information in such a way as to help teams take ownership of the results and make better decisions.
Sometimes, when we deal with breakthrough innovations or offerings, the challenge is to estimate the size of a new market space. In these situations, we use our Blue Potential™ tool. This tool is based on a large repository of experience, with around 350 studies carried out in Europe and the US to date. It combines key success factors, such as intention to buy and differentiation, with a module that takes into account the marketing efforts involved in the launch of a new offer notably, assumptions on awareness and distribution levels over time.
The resulting consumer profiles, covering socio-economic status, attitudes and habits, can be used to define key targets for your offer.
Customer Value Proposition: why does your customer really buy your product?
Successful businesses have one thing in common – they offer a product or service that helps customers achieve their objective more effectively, conveniently or affordably. By implication, to be successful, brands must offer the product that most closely meets a customer’s real needs. They need a strong Customer Value Proposition.
Strategic Research works with clients to create and evaluate a Customer Value Proposition. We use specialist tools to enable a brand to position its offer competitively, according to customers’ key decision-making criteria.
