Digital Slices

Segmentation has always been a key part of marketing. Sorting customers into appropriate segments allows business and marketing types to filter ideas, glean intelligence, set prices, and decide what to offer and what to toss.

Segmentation also allows successful companies to produce just the right thing to address the needs of different slices of the market.

DEFINE: Best Of

Separating "How" from "What

One of the advantages of working as a consultant is that you get to look at the big picture across corporations. You can see trends and common themes that might not be obvious to somebody working in a single company.

One of the themes that’s become very clear lately is our industry’s difficulty telling the difference between “how” and “what” when designing products.

Define

New Market & Product Definition

“What’s my opportunity?”

One of the toughest challenges for a technology company is finding the intersection between customer needs and product features. Miss it and you’ll end up with a product that’s beloved by geeks but unsalable to anyone else. Often different people in your company will disagree on what is the right thing to do. We’re experts at defining and sizing new markets, identifying what features would be most compelling to customers, and forecasting how to win. We use objective data to get everyone on your team into agreement on what needs to be done.

What we deliver:

Long-term road map. Often tech companies become so focused on the needs of the current product they’re developing that they neglect longer-term strategy and planning. This leaves them vulnerable to being outmaneuvered by a competitor who takes a longer view or simply leap-frogs their current offering. We help you develop a long-term product and market road map, a practical vision that coordinates your plans and makes sure you’re building toward long-term victory. We combine competitive strategy, customer needs, and technology trends to map the potential development of the market. We help your team understand the trends, identify your opportunities for lasting advantage, and plan a unified long-term product and marketing strategy that leads to victory.

Market definition. Let’s face it, many tech companies design products that look appealing to people in-house but aren’t attractive to buyers in the real world. We help you avoid this trap through focused market research to determine what problems your customers have and how you can best solve them. We bring the customers to life for everybody in your company, so you get quicker agreement internally, faster time to market, and products that customers actually want to buy. We’ve developed a suite of quantitative and qualitative research tools that produce reliable results quickly. Depending on the complexity of your market, we can deliver firm answers in as little as four weeks.

Market sizing and ROI analysis. It’s expensive to enter a new market. Before you proceed, you need to know just how much of the market you can capture, and what it will cost to do so. We analyze the market topography and future interests of potential customers, and then design a pragmatic go-to-market model that allows you to decide how much you want to spend to win that particular market. Then you and your Board can make an objective decision on whether it’s an opportunity worth pursuing.

Examples of Our Work

We helped an enterprise telecom software company define its first line of consumer services. We identified target market opportunities and unmet user needs, and worked with the product team to successfully prioritize features, forecast sales, and set pricing.
We helped a consumer electronics company create its first long-term product road map, identifying latent market segments, pinpointing critical new technologies that needed to be developed and patented, and predicting where the competition would attack and what to do about it. The result was a long-term plan that enabled faster product execution, reduced conflict and rework within the company, and coordinated several generations of products.
We helped a video software company evaluate whether to enter a new market segment. We identified which of their 50+ technologies were appropriate given interest and capabilities of the users, what prices users were willing to pay, and what channels were needed. This resulted in a sizing & ROI analysis to help the Board decide if this opportunity was worth pursuing, and how much to invest to make sure it was a profitable business.

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