Market Assessment
Investing with greater confidence

The Challenge
A good new product can bring profitability to a young company or accelerate earnings at a mature company. In some situations, a new product can even create a brand new industry. For example, Personal Digital Assistants (e.g., PalmPilot, Handspring) barely existed in the mid 90's. By 2005, the Aberdeen Group predicts those products will have spawned an industry selling 39 million units per year worth $6.6 billion in annual revenue.

The good news is that it's really easy to come up with a good idea for a new product or service. The bad new is that it's hard to come up with an idea that is good enough. The idea has to be so compelling that customers are willing to change their behavior - drop their old habits, spend time to understand your product, and begin using it. With business customers, for example, this means your product/service has to solve a fundamental business problem - it either has to remove pain from the organization or has to create a dramatic new possibility for them. And, it has to do this better than any other alternative they have, including the most popular alternative - "status quo."

But, passing the customer hurdle is just the first hurdle. There's another important hurdle - the internal hurdle - is the product worth launching? Can you deliver the product/service and still make a profit? There's another hurdle - the competitor hurdle. Can you provide a compelling product that will gain and retain adequate market share or will this be a me-too, late-to-market product or service?

Without appropriate consideration of the customer, internal and competitive hurdles, the product stands a greater chance of failure, the typical fate of most new product introductions.

The Solution
Accèvero Group can help your organization evaluate the likelihood of passing the customer hurdle, the internal hurdle and the competitive hurdle. Typical activities in a project include:

  • Developing client criteria for a "new product success"
  • Estimating potential customer demand and margin potential
  • Determining implementation costs and ongoing costs
  • Analyzing competitor capabilities and offerings
  • Synthesizing data vis-à-vis the client criteria for success

Projects are always custom-tailored and, depending on client needs, can range in scope from a detailed financial evaluation of the market to a "quick and dirty" assessment. Review a case study or contact us about your specific needs.

The Benefits
Client benefits typically include:

  • Improvement in likelihood of new product success
  • Balanced evaluation of the new product idea (customer, internal and competitive)
  • Program for periodically evaluating chances of success prior to raising R&D, operations and marketing investment levels