How important it is to understand your marketplace

This article is from an assigment I had to do for the ESCP business school. It is interesting to see how the brand evolved over the past few weeks, I think it gives some tips about understanding the marketplace plus it also means I was not so wrong :).

Either if you start your own company or work for an existing one, understanding your market place is critical and can bring you to the top or to shallows of the market. In this case, I took the example of BlackBerry, but I could really take many companies

I hope you will enjoy the reading and please feel free to exchange your idea with me.

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“How Blackberry could have used new market research technics for Business Success”

It is not that easy to target a brand that struggles on its market. Yes, it is the case
for many brands but they usually do have a bunch of marketing teams who try to
solve their problem.

In this assignment, I have chosen a brand that used to be the essence of
business communication: BlackBerry. This brand has been struggling for many
years now, trying to survive on a hyper competitive market.
As David Aaker said in his book “Managing brand equity”, “A brand is a
distinguishing name and/or symbol (such as a logo, trademark, or package
design) intended to identify the goods or services of either one seller or a group
of sellers, and to differentiate those goods or services from those of competitors.
A brand thus signals to the customer the source of the product, and protects both the customer and the producer from competitors who would attempt to provide products that appear to be identical.”

The company BlackBerry (BB) creates cellphones of course but has also
launched its own Operating System (OS) called “BlackBerry Operating System”
(BB OS) which only matches with BB’s cellphones. But today the BB OS only
matches with a limited number of applications although nowadays customers are eager to download more and more applications.

We will see where did Blackberry failed and what research questions and
objectives would have preserved them from failing? I will then make some
recommendations on the application of traditional and creative market research
tools.

As Dr. Judy Bayer from Teradata well explained in one of her presentation, research is not just looking for numbers. What kind of information am I looking for? Am I looking for qualitative or quantitative information? Am I looking for primary or secondary research?

1. What kind of questions/Research should I go for? And why?
With Blackberry, I think the entire research needs to be redone. The company used to well understand its market and even more, they created a segment. However, nowadays, they are painfully trying to survive.

a) Primary research/questions

a. Quantitative research

- Who are my potential core consumers and what are they looking for when buying cellphone?

o How satisfied the consumers are with our product?
o What are the top of mind product they think of? Am I in the top 3?
o What activity are they evolving in? School? Business? Other?
o What makes them like our phone? Is it the keyboard? Is it the OS? The overall quality?

b. Qualitative research

- How do our consumers feel about our cell phones?

- To them, what could be improved? Use the google glass to see what the consumers are doing when using your product. By this, you will see exactly where the consumer is interacting first, if there is some “repulsion” to use the cell phone or if they do not like one thing.

- What is, to them, our main advantage?
- Why do they buy BB instead of any other brand? Probe a lot on this question.

o Is it due to the security (OS more secure than the others), independency compare to the 2 biggest brands / Os makers?
o It a wish for a physical keyboard?

Analyse, build and learn

Analyse what you get from these questions.

These qualitative and quantitative questions will lead to a lot of data. Their analysis is a critical step that will help BB ground a solid positioning. Moreover, the more data BB will collect the better as it will enable the company to understand why consumers are looking for their product, what they
would like to see in it and what is missing right now.

Build a strategy.
After the analysis necessarily comes the implementation of a strategy to gain further market shares on the cellphone market. Depending on the problems BB will have detected (e.g : is it an Operating System issue? Is it a positioning issue?), the company could be advised to evolve on a niche market (even if this implies for BB to take the risk that big brands such as Samsung or Apple come and cannibalise the niche), or if it is also a matter of product not matching the demand anymore (no wish of physical keyboards), etc.

But before investing a lot of cash in launching a new global strategy, BB has to validate the assumptions coming from the analysis by building up a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This MVP could be either an android platform, full tactile screen, or keeping the keyboarded phones but improving it.

Learn from the results of the MVP.

As Jerome couturier and Davide Sola from ESCP Europ well explained in their
book “How to think strategically”, the MVP is a great solution to try and learn fast. Brands such as Zappos, or IDEO used this to test their strategy and learn from their failures. Furthermore, this does not cost a big budget but brings a lot
of knowledge.

e.g : If the main idea was to move to an android OS, the company should try to see how it is perceived by customers that represent the most important potential for the company.
e.g : if the main idea was to have a cell phone running on android while keeping the BB messenger system, the company should try to get the programmers working on this.

Primary researches are done, product is now on try and BB is getting data. This is helpful but not enough. How do you see the evolution of the market just by talking to your consumers? You also need some secondary data to see how the market is moving, what people are looking for, what do they do with their phones… This will help you to develop a product that should bring consumers

b) Secondary research/questions

As a leader on its segment, BB used to collect a lot of data from their consumer. This amount of data is available and should be use to better understand the evolution of the use of the cell phones. Also, the phone industry is one of the highest data absorbing industry. There is then plenty of data available and ready to be used. When you go on Facebook for example, there is a track on what you do, where you go, what you look for.

You could also look for data such as:
- What are the actual trends related to the purchase of a cellphone?
- Who are the KOL (Key Opinion Leader) in each segment identified in primary research
and how can we talk to them and get their feeling on our product?
- Analyse the consumers that are not satisfied by BB and who will likely go to the competition

To conclude on this small topic, there are plenty of data available on this market and Blackberry should definitely go for it. This will help them, with the primary data, to rebuild a solid brand growing and evolving at the right position on its market. This
brand might not be the N°1 anymore but it can definitely comes back to the top 3 cell phones maker in the world.
They have the brand awareness, the people and the community. They now need the willing to do it.