What We Do
Have you ever asked yourself…
What are my customers buying from me?
What unique value do I deliver with my products, services, and processes?
What journey do customers take to get to me?
Why don’t other customers buy from me?
What other customer needs can I meet?
What other products, innovations, and/or cross-selling opportunities, consistent with my organizational skills and strategy, will address unmet customer needs?
What new technologies will meet customers’ needs better than current alternatives?
How should I optimize my organization to deliver the value customers demand?
How do I change the mindset of my organization to meet the needs of new customers?
Does my customer definition include multiple value chain members?
Are changing demographics impacting me?
Is my pricing consistent with the value I deliver?
Clients come to Breakthrough Marketing Technology for intelligent insights into what customers will pay for. We provide advice, analysis, training, and coaching services for Global 1000 clients. Our onsite diagnostic gets to the bottom of the barriers stalling business growth.
Our Approach
Our objective is to reduce your uncertainty by enabling fact-based decisions using the best information available from the markets you want to serve—both primary and secondary sources. We deliver actionable insights, recommendations, and processes based on understanding what is said, what is meant, and the context that motivates behavior.
- Discovery: Markets and customers are complex. We sift, sort, structure, and clarify your core challenges and identify root causes that inhibit achievement of your strategic objectives.
- Analysis: A profound understanding of how customers perceive you, your products or services, and your competition opens the doors to market-based decisions. Through analysis, we capture insights that lead to growth and more effective marketing.
- Innovation: By combining market knowledge and insights to our experience and creativity with what you do best, patterns of profitability are revealed. We translate those inputs into recommendations for innovation offerings and business models.
- Success: The most powerful success is ongoing and incorporates continuous improvement of your innovation. We create dashboards and other mechanisms for listening closely to your market. This information builds a market-leading organization.
Our Tools
Our marketing technology is built on a foundation of unique growth tools and approaches to uncover differentiated, actionable customer and market insights.
- Hybrid Voice of the Customer: Combine the best of the qualitative interview and the core of a pricing and positioning quantitative assessment
- The Breakthrough Toolkit™: Identify the products and services that are most attractive to your core customers
- Market Space Investigation™: Art and science converge for sound decision making in this high-level assessment of multiple markets that provides a process and factual basis for developing and evaluating new concepts
- Rapid Market Assessment™: Learn to master a disciplined approach for identifying or validating a market opportunity
Innovative Business Transformation
The process to make strategic product and marketing decisions starts with your internal vision and adds insights into what markets will value to grow your business. We characterize the behavioral and emotional responses customers do and will have to products, services, and individuals—as appropriate. In doing so, marketers receive the information they need to generate the compelling benefits, value propositions, and positionings that go beyond functional appeals.
Future Business History℠ is part of a process designed to lead a company or business through developing a vision and an aggressive growth strategy. The approach is based on a highly interactive framework that transforms the Future State vision. The set of targeted actions (on a timeline) and success measures comprise the Future Business History.
Voice of the Customer
Our Voice of the Customer engagements go well beyond traditional market research. We design and deploy a set of choice exercises that elicit a variety of market perceptions. Qualitative techniques help us frame issues and language, providing an understanding of the market from a handful of target customers.
When analyzed as an integrated set, business leaders use output of the research to answer critical questions that impact business growth with market facts. It has to be done correctly to have value—to address your business objectives. We have mastered the art and science of distilling information from customers and markets.
Market-Driven Innovation
With Market-Driven Innovation, we provide clients with the roadmap to profitable growth. Our roadmaps are based on a deep intelligence on specific markets, customer needs, and their desired outcomes. The map starts with a market and ends with what you have to deliver to the market to drive revenue.
This market-back practice uses a set of well-defined tasks to identify, collect, analyze, and use what the market tells us to launch lucrative new offerings. Its success depends on your organization’s culture, which is an outgrowth of the leadership’s mindset, the skillset employed by your organization, and the toolset you use to make success happen.
Optimize Your Products
Understanding the meanings of your brand and how it should be communicated to full advantage is both an art and a science. We are adept at asking the right combination of questions and exercises; using emotional, cultural, and experiential techniques; and conducting varied analyses that feed development of your marketing mix—product definition, promotional approach that includes positioning and motivating communications messaging, optimal price ranges based on your strategy, the place of distribution consistent with customer preferences, and the people and their behaviors that are required to implement your business model.
The Brand Action Model™ approach offers a new dimension of insights into consumer connections to brands. By understanding the social dimension of branding, the model enables us to manage the impact of environmental influences and leverage them to build a brand community, complete with supportive institutions and brand partners with shared values.
InnerMind Metrix™ enables us to identify and measure the emotions that drive brand preference at the same time that we collect the context in which those emotions live.
Create a Successful Ingredient Brand
Ingredient brands are those product components that not only add functional value, but also their logo on a main branded product or service adds to its own brand power to retain customer loyalty, evoke customer preference, and support premium price points. An ingredient brand not only adds value to the host brand’s equity, but in mature markets, it can also create or enhance differentiation. But how do you create a successful ingredient brand? What are the challenges of managing an ingredient brand?
Multicultural Marketing
A diverse marketplace is becoming the norm as both globalization and cultural merging increase. We help clients develop, understand, and implement multicultural marketing strategies to improve business—rom strategy creation through implementation. By leveraging social and cultural anthropology, as well as techniques to probe emotion-level responses, we learn the why and how of affecting desired behavior. Frequently, our work involves customized marketing, positioning, branding, and/or messaging to motivate preference.
Maximize Your Earnings – Price to Win Your Best Customers
Price is the one component of the marketing mix that has a direct and straight path to the bottom line, so price optimization is key. Proven analytics operationalizes pricing by identifying the optimum price range for your products today; and managing pricing policy for the long term health of your business.
The Changing World of Energy
Energy is a rapidly evolving sector. Whatever the technology, demand is driven by consumers. With new and growing access to data, consumer dynamics are changing.
We are unique in our understanding of technology, analytics, and the role that culture plays in consumer behavior. This can have significant implications for our clients. We have significant experience with everything from ethnographies focused on consumer behavior and preference, to worker safety in oil and gas, to predictive analytics on utility transformers, to evaluating high value solar materials, to communications and training for energy efficient workforce development.
Learn more about Energy: Where Technology & Consumers Collide