We were very pleased to discover their approach to developing and building out our brief and delivering additional assets to the project.
Some businesses were better prepared than others to cope with Brexit and COVID. Some industries are more badly hit such as the fishing industry while other flourished.
The commonality of those who coped, pivoted or thrived is having the right data at their fingertips to make informed, confident decisions.
Industrial organisations frequently don’t deal with the ultimate consumer, with VARs, Dealers, MSPs, wholesalers and others often holding the direct relationships. Understanding routes to market, the supply chain and what matters to each element of it is key to getting the right intelligence.
Even putting aside the introduction of new technology and processes, it’s increasingly difficult to get hold of those who hold the key to business changing insight.
You might have designed a great target customer list, but how do you get enough of them to respond? Maybe you want to keep your direct communications to the essentials such as service upgrades or legislative changes? Therefore, asking them the kind of questions that feeds into the ‘state of the nation, headline grabbing ’thought leadership reports will be a distraction. Speaking to people similar to your target customer is enlightening and easier to do.
So, whether your objectives are strategic or content driven, expert project scoping and audience selection is needed, with a heavy dose of persuasion skills.
By knowing how, where and when (and when not to!) use online survey panels, we are able to reach decision-makers. And we understand the implications of small sample sizes.
Typically, the industrial or manufacturing research we conduct fits into one of the following categories:
- Brand – The attributes associated with an organisation, how it’s positioned in a market and the competitive landscape.
- Market opportunity – Understanding the scale of an opportunity and the unmet needs that need to be addressed to capitalise on it.
- Product development – Innovation and product introduction based on grounded insight rather than a hunch is invariably better (although there’s nothing wrong with hunches).
- Price optimisation – Launch with confidence and understand the price elasticity.
- Customer satisfaction and retention – It needs to be objective and understand the drivers of dissatisfaction and likelihood of switching.
- Merger and acquisition – Research as part of due diligence can uncover a great deal that profit and loss accounts fail to show.
- Segmentation – Identifying different sectors and what is important to each is increasingly critical for targeting and content creation.
- Personas – Sizing the segments and identifying their outlying characteristics enables us to create buyer personas, and choose who to prioritise efforts on.
- Channel – Invariably qualitative in nature channel research helps to identify the issues that really matter to partners and how they position you to customers – sometimes they’re your key advocate.
Industrial areas we’ve worked in include: Fork lift trucks, the industrial internet of things, energy consumption, aerospace, automotive, hand towel manufacturing, control systems and logistics.
We’ve worked with global brands and are equally keen to help the small guys. Hit the contact us button to find out more.
