Market Arena Assessment
A long-term growth strategy drives investments and the allocation of resources. Research in a selected set of market arenas leads to a better understanding of potential growth areas, informing a discussion about your long-term goals and aspirations that will guide long-term and day-to-day efforts to create value.
A corporate strategy logically flows from these goals and aspirations, as shown in the cascade below. In practice, the thinking is rarely so top-down and linear, as the whole cascade must be internally self-consistent to be successful, and opportunities or constraints in other parts of the cascade can affect the thinking upstream. In this case, discussion and decisions on your goals and aspirations are best done using hard data and analysis about current and potential markets. Absent this shared knowledge base, any decisions on goals will likely be too high level to be actionable, or they may be specific, but based on incomplete information about the actual markets in which you will need to operate.
Our market arena assessment begins with a baseline of your enterprise. We interviews selected business and functional leaders to better understand your company, its capabilities, and your active markets. We draw out ideas your team has about new opportunities for business growth. From selected leaders we seek further detail on the definition of success for growth strategy development and the future of your company. We complement these interviews with conversations with subject matter experts. These help to better understand current and prospective market areas, relevant industry trends, and seed ideas of new potential opportunity areas. We summarize all these findings and develop initial options.
Following this, we organize the options and collaboratively narrow the set to the ones that merit more detailed analysis. The selection aims to prioritize the efforts in the following research and analysis step. For the selected opportunity areas, we articulate “Where to Play” and “How to Win” to ensure that there is a shared understanding of what we will subsequently research in more depth.
Research and Analysis
For the selected growth areas, we conduct research to create a better understanding of the opportunity. This involves quantitative market sizing to gauge the addressable market and its trajectory. The research seeks to size the current market, project growth, and to the extent practical, quantify the different parts of the value system. Based on the availability of data, the market sizing analysis uses top-down and/or bottom-up approaches to estimate market sizing. Our research uses industry association materials, government publications, trade journals, think tank reports, public company filings, proprietary databases, and additional open-source materials. We may include purchased reports to supplement the research.
We also analyze the competitive environment. We seek to understand the competitive intensity, fragmentation of competitors, and size and scope of companies in the selected areas. This feeds into a Porter’s Five Forces analysis where we summarize the industry rivalry (competitive intensity), relative power of customers and suppliers, and the threat of substitutes and new entrants.
We build on the analysis to assess your potential value proposition. That is, we assess the “How to Win” for a selected market against our understanding of the market structure and dynamics. Combining this with the market sizing and Five Forces analysis creates a thumbnail sketch of the attractiveness of the different opportunity areas.
We summarize the findings for an executive or board audience to support a discussion of your goals and aspirations based on a tangible set of options for growth. Here is an example output, for a basalt fiber study we did for a client in 2017:
Campaign Solutions and Books
Market Franchise Map
Well-planned and executed campaign strategies can lead to enduring market franchises
Competitive Position
Understand your position on defending or contesting for market leadership
Pipeline Analysis
Integrate market & competitive position analysis, understanding each opportunity