Market strategies - resources
The process of developing market strategies from setting target markets, analysing competition and identifying key capabilities to developing plans, brands and branding and understanding different types of markets.
For help and advice on developing marketing plans and strategies contact info@dobney.com
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Science and technology markets |
This means that a specialist approach is needed to understand how to develop the appropriate market strategies to win and hold customers looking to products that are not yet understood by consumers, while building relationships with suppliers and developers. |
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Segmentation - building for business alignment |
In particular, the business has to be aligned to the segments to ensure each segment has appropriate products and services, and each segments needs to be clearly identified for targeting, and tracked over time to measure performance. Many pure market research segmentations fail once the research money has been spent, because the business short-circuited the implementation phase required to deliver a successful segmentation. |
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Implementation - making it happen |
A team will be needed, resource requirements need to be identified, the strategy needs to be honed, developed and revised with others in the organisation, and the resources obtained in terms of budget, staffing and skills and placed into a plan with costs, timescales and milestones, while keeping an eye on who is the customer and what the customer will buy. |
Healthcare markets |
Healthcare encompasses markets from pharmaceutical and development of medications, to medical devices, and on to service providers. Our projects help businesses navigate the complex structures to identify how efficacy and efficiency drive decisions and recommendations on medicines, devices, processes and protocols to ensure the right products are tested, and taken through approval processes using techniques like conjoint analysis. | |
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Strategic analysis |
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Analysing target markets |
While counts and statistics are needed for forecasting, customers in the target market also need to be sketched as individuals using personas, or use-cases, or pen portraits to bring out the essential qualities of individuals and businesses so as to try to think like the customer thinks. |
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Analysis of capabilities and competencies |
A businesses will 'know' what it does, however, articulating core strengths, seeing how these capabilities can be leveraged into new areas and deciding where to allocate resources for development and investment are always subject to judgement and need to be clearly articulated and mapped on to customer needs and competitive threats. |
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Analysis of competition |
Competitive analysis can be carried out as a one-off project, or drawing on the wider pool of knowledge from ongoing programmes of competitor intelligence gathering. |
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About brands |
Brands work at several different levels at once, conveying information about what is on offer, the quality of a product or service, who the product is meant for and what the product says about the buyer. Strong brands create long-standing intangible value with unique, defendable market positions. |
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Brand experience |
For a brand to work consistently and successfully the brand as a whole has to work for the customer from start to finish. We describe this as the brand experience - how does the brand deliver through all it's touch points? |
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Brand content and personification |
In qualitative research, projection techniques are often used to help explore feelings and perceptions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. One very common technique for assessing a brand is known as personification - imagining the brand is a person (or other object) and then trying to describe that person in human-to-human terms. These techniques can be extended to sensory-emotional method for understanding deeper connections to brands. |
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Brand families |
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The financial benefits of brands |
Branding is thus an investment decision in addition to being a promise to the customer. Brand equity is used to measure the value of the brand, as it is important to recognise how a brand adds value and what that value is in financial and investment terms. |
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Brands in business markets |
In business markets, purchasers are often buying the quality of supply, rather than just the product itself, and often pass on the quality of component brands as evidence of quality to their own customers. Establishing a brand, and reputation for quality of delivery, are essentials part of successful business to business marketing. |
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From the creative step to detailed plans |
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Business-to-business markets |
In business-to-business markets (B2B) customers purchase in more structured ways often with specialist buying units and not just individuals and ideas like 'value-in-use' more than pure pricing. The purchase it typically for long term, so marketing is more focused on customer relationships via account managers than is normally true for consumer markets. |
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Marketing effectiveness |
Marketing effectiveness is about estimating the return on marketing spend. While online click-through and conversion rates do provide estimates of cost per lead and cost per sale, many markets are not reliant purely on online advertising. How does TV, radio, blogging and events measure up in terms of return on spend? |
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Service design and differentiation |
Service design is about understanding the customer journey, and tailoring a service plan to make the customer feel comfortable, confident and cared for on all points of the journey. |
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Pricing strategies |
Behind successful pricing strategies is an understanding of the demand curve - how demand shifts as prices change. Pricing research is central to understanding demand and to track competitor behaviours. |