Tools

Our marketing technology requires unique growth tools and approaches to uncover differentiated, actionable customer and market insights. Read our Case Studies to learn more about how we have used these growth tools to help our clients grow their businesses and increase revenue.

Hybrid VOC

Get the most out of the precious time you have to interact with potential customers in a new business development mode.

Hybrid Voice of the Customer, or Hybrid VOC, is a methodology that combines the best of the qualitative interview and the core of a pricing and positioning quantitative assessment.

Key decision makers and influencers are asked to complete a set of exercises in a face-to-face interaction. Their responses trigger a focused discussion about their answers and about additional need areas. Responses from several sets of participants are analyzed, along with key statements as notes, to generate a basis for progressing with new product development and commercialization. The analysis generates

• How the concept or new product should be formulated to deliver customer value
• The price customers would be willing to pay for the concept product
• The share you could expect to receive once in a competitive environment
• Who among potential customers would be most ready to test and purchase the concept product

A Hybrid VOC Interaction

There are a few keys to designing a Hybrid VOC interaction:

• Establish a clear objective—what you need to know for what purpose.
• Set a well-defined scope to include addressable market and competitive environment.
• Describe the concept product—what it is and why it can do what it can do.
• Identify possible customer outcomes—what they want to happen in their businesses.
• Generate potential product features—what any product must do to address those outcomes.
• Define the competitive environment and the performance options customers have.
• Formulate a considered pricing range and enable the customers to select their value level.

The Breakthrough Toolkit™

Value Proposition in a Box℠

The Breakthrough Toolkit™ is an integrated data tool that describes the products and services that deliver the experience your most desirable customers value. A sample of customer perceptions is collected and analyzed. Multiple methodologies are blended into one, delivering the interrelated marketing 4 Ps (product, price, place, and promotion) for the best value in statistical research today.

The Breakthrough Toolkit delivers robust marketplace analysis for fact-based business decisions. We perform a set of causal exercises based on behaviors. We require respondents to make choices of one answer over another to generate realistic and actionable results.

The Breakthrough Toolkit addresses market conditions that challenge customer lifetime value:

The Breakthrough Toolkit is based on surveys of about 100 respondents per customer segment. It is undertaken only after sufficient preliminary inquiries, usually in the form of interviews, have determined the customers/prospects to be investigated; the key performance attributes and product features to assess; and the outcomes customers/prospects want to achieve in order to quantify the characteristics of their desired experience.

A Tool That Delivers Quickly

The Breakthrough Toolkit delivers results quickly. Once the target respondents are identified and the survey is designed, we deliver results within four weeks from start to finish. The Toolkit is cost effective; you, the client, own the workbook for ongoing scenario planning and to build internal capability. And the Toolkit is fact-based, with quantitative results generated from the voice of the customer:

Highly automated, the Breakthrough Toolkit makes statistical analysis easily accessible to the non-statistics marketer. It is a consistent means to explore “what if” scenarios, so you can examine whether and how you want to enhance the customer experience. Whether for existing markets or new markets, it provides numerous interactive screens that allow analysis to be viewed from multiple perspectives:

Market Space Investigation™

Which markets make sense for your concept?

Market Space Investigation™ is a high-level assessment of multiple markets that provides a process and factual basis for developing and evaluating new concepts for products or services. It satisfies the need to understand the current market landscape and whether customers find your concept for a new product or new service attractive. With Market Space Investigation, your business team can

• Uncover the factors that would cause a market to have interest in your concept
• Identify information you would want to include in a quantitative concept test, using analytics to determine pricing and positioning

Market Space Investigation ensures that you don’t overlook potentially valuable, market-specific opportunities for your innovation idea, and helps you select your most promising market-specific opportunity or opportunities for market validation. Market Space Investigation is done prior to chartering an innovation project.

Market Space Investigation can lead to a market-driven innovation project or projects, which will proceed through the deep, single market assessment in the Market Validation step.

Rapid Market Assessment™

Understand New Markets

Rapid Market Assessment™ (RMA) is a deep qualitative dive into a market space to determine if there is a potentially attractive opportunity for your current business offerings to provide profitable benefits to either an adjacent market or geographical market that you currently do not serve.

With Rapid Market Assessment, you gain firsthand knowledge through focused interviews of the selected market in order to be able to

• Describe the market dynamics and emerging trends in technology, needs, and offerings
• Identify emerging discontinuities in the market
• Define values and needs of specifying users
• Validate the value chain, where money is made and centers of power exist
• Establish an understanding of main players that could become acquisition targets based on the market-back view
• Offer alternatives to market entry that capitalize on your strengths

Learnings will then be used to advance the market space into further in-depth market assessment, through a full market assessment to confirm (or disconfirm) your original assessment, as well as an in-depth market evaluation and strategy.

Your team will deliver a summary of the

• Scope of the opportunity (how broad, narrow, or focused)
• Value of the opportunity
• Strategic fit with your company (with whom and how)
• The industry or market, including composition of the market, key players, market drivers, unmet needs, key issues, influencers, and who has the power in the chain
• Characterization of key players who are potential acquisition targets
• An initial business hypothesis and value proposition
• Other opportunities that may have emerged from the work

The RMA Approach

We will meet with your leadership team in a half-day session to develop a project charter and define the team required to conduct the Rapid Market Assessment. We will conduct a one-day workshop to generate an initial sketch of the market(s) to engage. We will then coach and/or actively participate in the team’s work to generate the considered market learnings required to make a recommendation. We will conduct another one-day workshop with the team, this time to develop recommendations and the path forward. Lastly, we will make our recommendations.

Rapid Value Assessment

The Rapid Value Assessment™ (RVA) is aimed at testing the value for a new concept in an existing or new market. It starts with understanding the market, and focuses on how to translate the concept into a value proposition. It usually covers Rapid Market Assessment topics first.

Over time, the RVA process has grown to stay abreast of changing innovation needs. Although the basic premise hasn’t changed, there are some innovative twists to addressing the question “How does the market value our concept?”

There are four types of these new innovative RVA approaches:

• Vertical RVAs are co-sponsored by both an upstream player and a downstream player in the value-adding chain. These development partnerships not only identify even more promising innovations, but also accelerate the development process even faster.
• Hybrid RVAs add key quantitative questions to the engagement. Hybrid RVAs are especially critical in marrying outcomes to concept features. They add clarity to expectations; some even add pricing options to the value assessments.
• Clustering RVAs involve investigating related concepts simultaneously, giving the participants the opportunity to compare value to cost options.
• Extended RVAs involve moving on to a quantitative product evaluation on the fly. Learnings lead to an opportunity to prototype concepts early on to better align product features to user needs.

Market Uncertainty Assessment

Do you know the potholes that can wreck your journey on the road to market success? Do you know how to recognize what will be an inconsequential bump and what will take you off road? Either way, those possibilities represent risks to arriving at your destination.

Luckily, these risks can be mapped, evaluated, and addressed before you venture into the market, so the ride is less rocky. Mitigating risks before the journey makes market entry less uncertain. Every business decision comes with risks. They can cause you to fail or have no impact at all on your success. Do you know which ones to mitigate and which to ignore?

Entirely eliminating all risk is impossible. However, you can minimize and manage risk with careful evaluation of the market drivers that introduce uncertainty into your assessment of an opportunity for market success. When dealing with market uncertainty, you need to be sure you consider all of its possible drivers.

For some drivers, you may have capabilities that will lead you to a competitive advantage. For others, you may instead need to develop strength in them, because they are what is important to your target market. Strength in what matters to the market you want to serve is what reduces market risk – a key dimension of market leadership.

If there is one thing we know for sure, it’s that data-driven insights help teams improve and modify their performance, but with so many variables to consider, how do you decide what to pay attention to?

Our market uncertainty assessment will help you organize, prioritize, and then evaluate those uncertainties that can affect your business performance if not addressed. There are multiple options to make use of this assessment and your approach will depend on both how much market information you already have and/or the makeup of your team.

^TMBreakthrough Toolkit is a trademark of Breakthrough Marketing Technology, LLC
^SMValue Proposition in a Box is a service mark of Breakthrough Marketing Technology, LLC
^TMRapid Market Assessment is a trademark of Breakthrough Marketing Technology, LLC
^TMRapid Value Assessment is a trademark of Breakthrough Marketing Technology, LLC