Ti Consulting: Multi-country market survey and competitor profiling helps re-design European business strategy

The Brief

A major transport asset leasing company wanted to review its strategic positioning and develop a business plan for its core European markets including Benelux, Germany, France, UK and Scandinavia.

The review included examining industry characteristics in each market, customer requirements, competitor positioning as well as mapping these against the Client’s own business attributes.

Key questions the Client needed answered included:

• Why had it lost share in some fast growing markets
• Why were some of its competitors proving more attractive?
• What should their pricing strategy be?
• Where were the opportunities for future profitable growth?
• Which industry sectors should be
  targeted?
• Who are the future customers?
• Which geographies should it focus on?
• What actions should it take and what would the financial implications be?

Ti's Approach and Methodology

Market profiling
To provide an in-depth understanding of the market, it was necessary to examine the characteristics and needs of small, medium and large sized customers and potential customers across multiple countries. The best way to ensure the quality of response needed by the Client was to initiate a programme of telephone surveys, validated by a number of more detailed and extensive face-to-face interviews. In order to obtain a representative sample from each category of customer in each country it was necessary to survey over 1500 individuals in their home language. In order to achieve this, Ti worked with a multilingual market research call centre using interactive questionnaire software. Ti managed the whole process and key members of the team were present at the call centre overseeing the programme and
ensuring quality control.

Competitor profiling
In order to provide profiles of the Client’s competitors, Ti undertook extensive secondary research using its own market intelligence resources and publicly available sources. In order to

gain greater insight into the strengths of the major leasing players, Ti used questions within the extensive multilingual customer survey to identify strengths and weaknesses of operations, technologies and pricing strategies It was then possible to compare and contrast customer perception of the Client’s services with that of its competitors.

For each competitor, Ti looked (amongst other things) at:

• • Regional differences across their organization
• • Pricing strategy
• • Management structure
• • Level of local operation responsibility
• • Vertical sector focus
• • Split between spot market and long term contract
• • Value propositions for each asset class
• • Technology deployed

The Results

This extensive market research campaign provided in-depth analysis on the competitive environment in the target markets and identified where gaps existed between the Client’s own line of products and the specific requirements of the potential customers across the 5 key geographic markets. A view on potential customers’ perception of the company was also derived from the study.

The intelligence gleaned from the project allowed the Client to develop a strategy on how best to serve potential customers in each country, redesigning its approach on a ‘country-by-country’ basis and repositioning its portfolio of products to target specific customer groupings within the target markets. A brand awareness campaign was launched, informing potential customers on the attributes of the Client’s products.