Winning-in-Market is an increasingly difficult task. The challenge of maintaining or achieving market leadership is regularly tested by changes to industry structure, new customer requirements, emerging competition, and innovative product introductions. Further, go-to-market options continue to grow in number and complexity. Springhill Consulting Group is committed to supporting client growth by providing a set of services that collectively address each key tenet required to win-in-market:
Industry / Market Analysis
Springhill’s Industry / Market Analysis offering helps clients answer two fundamental questions:
- In which market(s) should we compete?
- How should we position ourselves in the market to maximize success?
In which market should we compete?
Few decisions in business are more important than selecting the market(s) in which to compete. Making the right choice requires a detailed understanding for market structure, economics, and requirements. Structural analysis uncovers key segments and players, level of competitive rivalry, risk of substitutes, value chain models and key market trends. Economic analysis helps determine the financial potential that the industry offers, through various considerations including, but not limited to: size, growth, and profit margins. Requirements analysis summarizes the necessities or “minimum antes” needed to compete in a given market. Key requirement areas often include scale, scope, capital, regulatory, distribution, and customer expectations. Springhill is well versed in the variables that must be considered across the Structural, Economic, and Requirement areas before an informed market selection decision can be made.
Beyond offering detailed market analyses to help drive decision making, Springhill works closely with clients to map their growth expectations and capabilities to the market realities identified. This critical step helps to ensure that clients avoid making market choices based solely on the attractiveness of the opportunity without objective consideration for their likelihood to succeed in market.
How should we position ourselves in market to maximize success?
Effective market positioning is only possible after consideration of numerous strategic options. Springhill works closely with clients to help make the critical choices associated with selecting go-to-market channels, prioritizing segments and geographies, and pursuing specific customer types. It is these choices and the associated execution that ultimately determine market success or failure.
Competitive Strategy
Winning-in-market hinges on your ability to beat the competition. Surprisingly, few organizations are systematic in their approaches to collecting and disseminating competitive insight or in considering competitor response when making operating decisions. Collectively, this results in “blind” decision making that often includes significant wasted effort and an unhealthy reliance on luck. Springhill Consulting Group helps clients move beyond organizational mythology associated with competitors to truly understand competitor goals and assumptions, market strategies, and their ability to execute against stated priorities. Further, we help identify and interpret competitor signals of strategic change in their future directions. With this insight in hand, clients are better able to predict and respond to competitor activity, a key capability to winning in market. However, insight alone is not sufficient to craft a winning competitor strategy. Organizations require an objective perspective on how best to position their offerings and capabilities to differentiate from competition and gain share. Springhill Consulting Group provides that objectivity, allowing clients to create differentiated and defendable market positions.
Customer Analysis
Market leaders prioritize customer needs: a simple formula that nearly every organization claims to follow, but few execute effectively. Success is achieved when the impact on customer experience becomes the foundation for decision making across functions and business areas. Springhill Consulting Group is committed to helping clients drive growth through the design of customer-led strategies.
Specifically, we help clients develop customer segmentation and understand the “voice of the customer.”
Customer Segmentation:
Springhill’s customer analysis approach places emphasis on making intelligent customer segmentation choices, ensuring that customer groups are selected based on fit with client value proposition, ability to win / differentiate versus competition and financial impact.
Voice of the Customer:
Further, Springhill is also active in providing clients with critical Voice of Customer insights. Our objective and detailed insights offer a fresh perspective into customer needs, expectations, and goals. These insights provide the foundation for a variety of critical operating decisions including; channel selection, product development, new market entry and competitor positioning. Typical questions answered through Springhill’s Voice of Customer work include, but are not limited to:
- What are customer perceptions of our product / service and how it compares to competition?
- Which unmet customer need(s) should we prioritize in product development?
- How would customers prefer to purchase our product / service?
- Which market offers the best fit between our (client) capabilities and customer preferences?
Channel Analysis
Go-to-market choices are critical in determining an organizations addressable market size and its customer experience. Needless to say, channel choices require a complete and thorough evaluation of all potential options. Springhill works with clients to evaluate and select the right channels through which to sell products and / or services to end customers. In evaluating the “size of the prize” Springhill quantifies the opportunity that each channel provides to both the top and bottom line. The impact on customer satisfaction is not as easily quantified. However, through Voice of Customer techniques, Springhill can assess how each channel option will map to customer needs and expectations and therefore likelihood to purchase from our client or other alternatives.
Product Analysis
The options for marketing a product, service, brand, or technology are endless. Organizations require a systematic approach for determining how its product(s) can carve out a unique and valued niche in the market. Whether it is in preparation for a new product launch, a re-launch, or the desire to increase share, Springhill regularly supports clients with their product positioning decisions. Specifically, we advise clients on product value proposition, pricing, channel / distribution options, and marketing strategy.
Innovation
In today’s fast-moving, competitive markets, innovation is required for continued success. Despite the fact that “innovation” has recently become a popular term, business leaders understand that innovation has always been critical to business success and that innovation happens well beyond the R&D function. It is found in the business model, across all business functions, and even embedded in business activities.
At Springhill Consulting Group we offer three types of innovation support:
Market Idea Screening:
We have built capabilities that can efficiently help you analyze potential New Product and New Service ideas from a business perspective. Our focus is on providing the resources to make an informed decision about pursuing an idea, prior to major investment. Using the elements underlying our Growth Services, we analyze markets, competitors, customers, channels, and competitive or alternative products. These insights drive a fact-base upon which to make sound decisions about which ideas offer the best commercial possibilities.
Operational Idea Screening:
Innovation in a business’ operations typically leads to productivity gains that strengthen competitive positioning and performance in the market. Hundreds of process and/or functional innovation examples exist that have redefined an organization’s market position. Springhill Consulting Group helps clients analyze opportunities to change how they deliver value to customers by improvements in the way that they operate. Areas of analysis often include, but are not limited to: supply chains, distribution models, technology platforms, and pricing structures.
System Development:
Creating an innovative culture does not mean "every employee should take 1 hour a day to dedicate to new ideas." While innovation seems like such an amorphous concept, a requirement for its success is the right system. A set of policies, procedures, and clear responsibilities is critical to getting an organized group of individuals focused on achieving company goals. We help develop innovation systems that stimulate and motivate good innovation, not just a list of ideas. |
