Industry: Manufacturing
Revenues: $50 million
Location: Midwest

The Business Situation
The Client Company is an 80+ year old holding company whose principal division has built an industry leading position in an industry which is going through tremendous change with the onset of digital technology. The secondary division conceived of a new product that stretched into an adjacent industry, which Management envisioned as the centerpiece of a growth strategy and leadership initiative. This new direction would involve significant investment and exposure, so the Client Company decided to bring OneAccord in for seasoned, strategic advice and objective market validation of this new product and direction.

The OneAccord Solution
The OneAccord project team conducted comprehensive secondary research on the “adjacent” industry and contacted dealers, distributors, and experts. Armed with an understanding of the company’s current position and current industry, OneAccord partners debriefed with Management on a recommendation against positioning in this “overlap” industry.

OneAccord then designed and executed a comprehensive primary research campaign with dealers, distributors, buyers, influencers, and editors in the current industry – involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. This project involved a comprehensive analysis of customer requirements, buying dynamics, vendor selection, features and attributes, price points and elasticity – along with the development of a financial model projecting the size of the US and worldwide markets and what the Client Company could realistically achieve over a five-year period.

Results
While Management was regularly apprised of the project status and issues, extremely little time or bandwidth was demanded of the Client Company. OneAccord partners recommended, and Management approved, approaching the primary research as a bidirectional communication tool rather than just a one-way vanilla survey. In particular, communications made very clear that Client Company was going to new levels of listening to current and prospective customers, and wanted input from current and prospective channel partners.

This resulted in an impressive, statistically significant 15% response rate. More important, however, was that 95% of respondents affirmed the need in the industry for this new product and a whopping 85% of respondents asked to be notified when it was available. This pre-production “pipeline” dramatically increased Management’s value and return on investment.

Given that high-value features could be added for incremental cost, OneAccord partners recommended a two-prong (entry and deluxe) product introduction strategy. The Client Company is proceeding with investment in finishing R&D on the product, based on confidence in this five-year, worldwide sales projection of $30 million. Management plans to use OneAccord in the product launch once the R&D phase is complete.