Clients will often come to HelloInfo with little understanding of their competitive landscape, their market, and how these shift over time. This may be because they are moving into a new business area, their space is changing rapidly, their competitors are private companies, or the division they are competing with doesn’t publicize its financials. To help these clients, HelloInfo can perform a robust market sizing and competitive landscape assessment. However, this is impractical if they have budget limitations or require continuous monitoring of the space. In this case, we recommend one of our State of the Market reports.
Why our clients have deployed State of the Market reports
HelloInfo has numerous clients conducting State of the Market reports on a regular basis. These clients all express different needs and operate in different industries, but the approach and benefits are similar, as we will explore below.
Some examples of the needs expressed by our clients:
Client 1 is a Canadian firm that competes with large global entities. These larger entities are public companies that report very little about their Canadian operations. To understand relative competitiveness in the market, we conducted a State of the Market report specifically for Client 1. Insights gathered inform the strategy team and enable their planning function to take action across their organization.
Client 2 operates in an industry with razor-thin margins, where every hint of operational efficiency and market understanding makes an impactful difference to the bottom line. Client 2 engages us to conduct State of the Market reports to ensure they know their competitors’ strategic direction, focus initiatives, and where they are looking for growth. State of the Market reports also enable Client 2 to test their understanding of the customer, market size, and possible threats.
Client 3 operates in a very fast-moving space, with overlapping products and a diverse and complex competitive environment. Given the shifts that occur weekly in the market, the client needs regular insights into competitors, customers and the market. Insights are used by sales, product, strategy, and marketing teams to know how to position the company and its offerings in this fast-paced environment.
Insights collected in a State of the Market report
As you can likely expect, insights collected in a State of the Market report vary, depending on the company’s strategic need, the stakeholder audiences being served, and the competitive landscape the company is playing in.
Insights HelloInfo can collect include:
- Competitor divisional or regional financials
- Competitor margins
- Competitor strengths and weaknesses, and how these are shifting
- Most worrisome competitor opportunities and threats
- Market size and share assumptions
- Headwinds and tailwinds affecting the market
- Shifts in customer needs
Methodology deployed
HelloInfo deploys a multi-modal research approach in its State of the Market reports:
- Secondary research provides a foundation for the output, ensuring that publicly available insights, where available, are included. Further, this provides a starting point for the second key aspect of the research, in-depth interviews.
- In-depth interviews with industry participants offers insights that cannot be found in the public domain, and serve as the core methodology used to answer client State of the Market questions. Interviewee targets can range from competitor employees to customer employees, or those in other places of the supply chain. The targets vary depending on the insights to be gathered. Relationships are developed with key interview targets, to ensure insights can be collected on a regular basis, ensuring the repeatability of the research.
Outputs in a State of the Market report
As with all HelloInfo engagements, all outputs are customized to accommodate client need and the core questions in focus. HelloInfo leverages typical analysis models such as heat maps, SWOT/TOWS, PESTEL, strategic quadrants, and a variety of data visualizations to ensure stakeholders can easily digest the findings.
Typical State of the Market report outputs include:
- Interview summaries document, containing key insights collected from the interviews
- Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint deliverable with key findings
- Executive summary and recommendations for our client
By performing this research on a regular basis, HelloInfo can track changing industry trends, as well as monitor new threats and opportunities in the market. Do you feel you could use more insight on your competitors, customers, and market? Reach out and
schedule a call with us to understand how HelloInfo can help.
