Understanding Your Competitive Environment
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Understanding Your Competitive Environment

June 27, 2013

Understanding your competitive environment and where your brand fits in – it’s probably the most commonly requested research service, and the most important to a brand’s survival. Our combination of business strategists and research expertise mean we’re ideally equipped to answer these crucial questions.

Understanding your competitive environment and where your brand fits in – it’s probably the most commonly requested research service, and the most important to a brand’s survival. Our combination of business strategists and research expertise mean we’re ideally equipped to answer these crucial questions.

Segmentation studies, which allow you to identify high value target customers and the behaviors and emotions that they hold in common – should form the backbone of marketing strategy. Done correctly, these studies present clear, differentiated portraits of your customers and become a constant point of reference internally in the development of new products and communications. In essence, they become a living, breathing window into what your customers want and need.

We regularly conduct concept tests as well, gauging not only consumer affinity to a concept, but how likely they are to talk about it, buy it, and believe that it conveys the broad series of emotional and functional benefits they’re looking for. When overlaid on a segmentation, concept tests demonstrate whether your high value consumers also see the benefits of your current and potential offerings.

If you’re seeking to better understand your high value consumers, or to test new concepts in a holistic way that unveils their true feelings across a broad range of key metrics, call Kelton.

Segmentation Studies

Kelton’s Quantitative Team includes highly seasoned segmentation experts who are comfortable working on segmentations varying from regional to global in size and scope. Kelton’s experts have experience working with most competitive segmentation modeling techniques; we frequently utilize Maximum Difference Scaling, 2-Step, Canonical Correlations, Latent Class Analysis, and other uniquely innovative methods to ensure our clients’ particular objectives are clearly met.

Kelton’s segmentation solutions focus on the following core market segment concerns:

  • Solutions Engineered. Our wide experience – both methodologically and from functional perspectives – affords Kelton the ability to clearly establish a client’s overarching business needs when developing marketable consumer segments on their behalf.
  • Distinct Consumer Segments:  The most understandable and marketable consumer groups are those that have clearly defining characteristics, whether strong demographic divisions, core emotional differentiators, or functional differences. Kelton segmentations establish well-differentiated target consumers, as well as an enhanced understanding of what their specific core needs and values are.
  • Marketable Consumers:  We provide clients with a detailed roadmap for reaching their target consumer groups and present a key understanding of which groups represent the highest potential ROI.  Kelton also possesses innovative analytical methodologies that help us identify the emotional and functional benefits for the harder to reach consumer populations.  The result is an increased share of market, as well as consumers whose functional – as well as emotional – needs have been met.

Brand Landscape Studies: Understanding Your Core Equities and Competitive Set

Kelton’s brand health methodology paints a comprehensive picture of your current brand landscape in order to identify and maximize the competitive advantages that drive increased awareness and sales. This clear portrait of your industry assesses how brands compete, and what positioning they use to do so; it lays out key areas of opportunity based on unmet consumer needs, your brand equities, and the attitudes which ultimately drive purchase behavior.

This examination of the broader marketplace affords you the room to understand not only your strengths and weaknesses, but those of your key competitors as well. We assess both the effectiveness of your current brand positioning, and how you can potentially move into un-owned whitespace (areas of key unmet consumer need). Our innovative approach provides you with a detailed look at:

  • Consumer Attitudes and Market Perceptions. We uncover the specific attitudes, beliefs, and emotional needs that directly affect purchase intent; this crucial data helps create more affective brand positionings and consumer messaging directly.
  • Competitive Market / Unmet Consumer Needs Assessment.  Correspondence Analysis, Discriminant Analysis, and Multi-Dimensional Scaling allow us to create a visual map depicting how the consumer views your brand and key competitors.  This competitive analysis provides benchmarks of key metrics, such as brand affinity, while also spotlighting unmet consumer needs you can meet.

Concept Testing

Today’s most successful brands continually evolve to meet changing consumer needs – this often entails the near constant development of new products, line extensions, and positionings. Unfortunately, the research methods used to test new concepts are often confusing, misleading, and hardly differentiate one option from another, statistically. Our concept testing methodologies highlight exactly which positionings have the most potential market strength.

For brands with strong consumer loyalty – where consumers are likely to react positively to a broad range of new ideas and concepts – Kelton employs Maximum Difference Scaling to force consumers to make real world choices; it’s a methodology that prevents respondents from saying “yes” to every option. What’s more, our approach pinpoints not only which new concepts have the most go-to-market potential, but also why consumers feel the way they do about your concepts.

In-Depth Understanding of the Whys of Product Preference. There’s incredible value in understanding the key emotional and functional benefits that drive consumer preferences; that information guides future concept development.  Through both open-ended and quantitative questions, we highlight the emotional underpinnings of consumer choice.

True Product Preferences.  Consumers don’t make decisions in vacuums – and research shouldn’t ask them to.  Our methodology provides you with results that mimic real-world discrimination by placing each concept in a competitive set – so consumers are forced to make choices.  It’s a wholly accurate and realistic model for predicting consumer behaviors.

 

 

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