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Know Your Market
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3 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND ITCo has been in business for 6 years and was formed with the intention of being a company that provides innovative marketing database solutions tailored specifically to the marketer. The business started with ad hoc Bureau work using proprietary software that enabled work to be conducted faster than most other Bureaux in the market place. In 1997 we developed a new product that enabled Clients to access and query their data via a secure web link (Quick Counts) and this became a market leader for this type of product. In the years since, many more companies have released their own versions of this type of software that has more functionality than our original product. We have only discovered this when we have attended industry exhibitions or have feedback from our sales force, which has only recently been expanded to three personnel as opposed to one less than 10 months ago. We have recognised that we had not paid attention to the market in the past three to four years and our revenues were suffering as a result. A five year tactical plan was implemented in 2001 which saw the introduction of a marketing department for the first time in our history. Much of the past 12 months has been devoted to setting up the foundations as well as upgrading our sales collateral and launching our company brand. In 2002 a five year strategy was finalised that includes a theme of “Innovation” where the focus must now be on developing innovative solutions to meet the needs of the market place. Part of the preparation for the Strategy included some unstructured market research that sought to identify our market arena, its potential growth and other markets that we perceived we have some cross over in. 4 RESEARCH PURPOSE In order to fulfil the needs of the company strategy we now need to identify gaps in our current product offering that do not meet current Client and prospect functionality requirements in the Enterprise Marketing Automation (EMA) market. This will enable the marketing department to write an Initial Proposal for our new R & D department that will enable them to re-develop our product offering with the aim of increasing new business sales. 4.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES I. Establish EMA Market size and potential growth for next 2 to 3 years II. Identify target market segments by data volume, decision making unit (DMU) and level of technical expertise. III. Understand Client issues in terms of their marketing role and their requirement to meet their company business objectives. IV. Identify Client and Prospect database marketing functionality requirements. V. Examine reasons for lost new business sales and current barriers to new business sales. VI. Establish need to new channel (i.e. email & sms) integration into required functionality. VII. Compare our current offering to our direct competitors’ offering in terms of functionality and look & feel. 4.2 PRESENTATION AND USE OF RESULTS The results should be presented in the form of a written report clearly separating the following sections: I. Market size and growth. To include: - Graphs depicting market growth patterns in EMA, CRM and Data Warehousing markets. - Identification of issues currently being discussed but no figures are available. - Boston Matrix showing position of ITCo in relation to total market value and key competitors to help validate the need to improve our solution offering in terms in revenue generation. II. Competitive offerings* broken down by at least the following criteria: - Web or desktop solution - “Point and Click” or “Drag and Drop” querying (and “Other” if applicable) - Ability to run train of thought queries - Ability to create segments based on queries and apply them to the data set - Ability to save query criteria and results - Graphical display of query results (include types of graphics available) - Ability for user to profile counts against a set universe. - Ability for User to define profiling universe - Ability for user to import modelling code to dynamically apply to data in order to query data - Integration with Client’s own databases or need to have vendor’s database - Ability to plan, execute and track off-line and on-line campaigns - Ability to extract data - Any other criteria that may come out from research III. Market issues* - This may include data quality, speed of data turnaround from data receipt to data extraction, cost of solutions, expertise & training required and perception of the EMA software market. - Whatever the issues, themes must be clearly stated. IV. Market requirements* - This must be broken down by the same criteria used to compare competitive offerings as well as any new criteria that is uncovered in the course of the research. *Where possible the results must be split down by the market segments established in objective II and if volumes are too small to make results meaningful then this must be made very clear in the presentation. The report must be sent via email to the Marketing Department (mailto:marketing@ITCo.co.uk) by 14th December 2002 and the findings to be presented to the Board by December 20th 2002. 4.3 SPECIAL FACTORS There is no budget available for the purchase of secondary research reports but there is budget for primary field research and all expenses will be paid if this requires travel, subsistence or Client entertainment. This should, however, not exceed £1500 in total. Internal expertise is available for the design and distribution of web enabled questionnaires and any requirement for this must be specified with at least one week’s notice.
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