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Analysis & Market Research
Click here for an outline of our services that relate to Benchmarking & Evaluation
Market Analysis - a collection of approaches and techniques used to evaluate current and potential markets as the basis for strategy and market planning.
Marketing Research - concerned with specific marketing problems or decisions such as naming a new product or service or setting price/fee levels.
A strong evidence base is the foundation to creating robust corporate and marketing strategies and for setting realistic objectives. It underpins decisions on setting fees, positioning, targeting and segmentation, communication channels and is essential to portfolio management and the launching of new services.
At The Knowledge Partnership we integrate strategy and analysis. Far too often research is designed by market researchers that have no direct experience of strategy development or marketing management decisions that the results are intended to inform. We take clients right back to that bigger picture so that the research can be designed to deliver as much value as possible.
Frustrated by agencies that just report simple frequency results, well you should be! The key is the quality of the analysis and the interpretation of the data to inform your choices.
In virtually all cases a reliance on primary research is highly dangerous. A review of existing published research and/or bespoke analysis of secondary data is essential as it:
- Helps in the design of the primary research
- May actually provide sound answers to generic questions
- Allows the primary results to be placed in a wider context
The Knowledge Partnership will adopt whichever mode of fieldwork and data collection is the best to meet your needs whether that is web-based, personal interviews or focus groups, telephone research or quantitative surveys. Concerned that you senior managers or internal experts might question quantitative results? We have statisticians and quantitative marketers to professorial level to support us.
Market Analysis
Whether you need to analyse current markets or new ones or new international territories The Knowledge Partnership can support you.
Effective analysis of secondary data can reveal so much. Indeed it is the core of any serious market analysis. The Knowledge Partnership has in-house expertise in the following areas and can call on additional specialists:
Trends in the supply chain. For example, a professional body would benefit from an assessment of the number students in university and college courses that feed into its professional career areas and a university department needs to know the trends in the number of students selecting pre-requisite subjects in secondary schools, and so forth.
An understanding of demographic change is also a basic component of market analysis. The growth in higher and tertiary education in many counties has been driven in large part by the greater participation of women and minority ethic groups. Now that was pretty predictable 10 years ago, and so should have been planned for!
Social and lifestyle changes are reflected in demand for knowledge services. The growth in demand for forensic science as a university course and a career can be traced directly to TV programming. Demand for certain healthcare services and the professionals needed to deliver them is the inevitable consequence of people living longer.
Labour market intelligence is another core strand of market analysis. Higher-level skill shortages and salary inflation indicate potential future demand from certain sectors for graduates. Are you positioning your organization or adjusting your portfolio to take advantage of predictable growth in certain occupations?
Most marketers are now familiar with the basic tenet of geodemographics or neighbourhood classification systems: People with similar cultural backgrounds, means and perspectives naturally gravitate toward one another to form relatively homogeneous communities. (It's the old "birds of a feather flock together" phenomenon.) Once settled in, people naturally emulate their neighbours, adopt similar social values, tastes and expectations and, most important of all, share similar patterns of consumer behaviour toward products, services, media and promotions. This approach can be used to improve target marketing (finding look-alikes - i.e. more people that have similar characteristics to you current users) and in forecasting (if the number of people that match the profile of your current users is forecast to increase this represents an opportunity). The technique can also help you to determine the best areas in which to locate new facilities or campuses.
Combining an analysis external and internal data such as sales, membership or enrolment data, user satisfaction results and financial margins can generate extremely valuable outputs:
- Baseline Market Share (useful for objective setting)
- Data for portfolio evaluative tools such as the Boston Matrix (growth-share) and Lifecycle Analysis
- Facilitate Penetration Analysis (similar to market share but on a micro level)
- Portfolio Analysis
For other forms of market analysis a combination of secondary and original primary research tends to be ideal.
Markets are formed whenever users have a choice. Competitor analysis is therefore central to strategic planning. There are a number of strands to competitor analysis including relative positioning, market image, credentials, market performance, etc.
Consumer behaviour is best understood by recording what consumers say and what they have actually done in the recent past. On what basis do your markets choose? In our opinion, far too many studies fail to distinguish properly between sources of information that impact on decision-making and sources of influence particularly when the gestation period of the decision is a long one (as it can be in education and careers).
Behavioural studies are linked to market segmentation as clearly not all potential users make decisions on the same basis. Here conjoint analysis techniques come to the fore in revealing what are often complex patterns of choice based on combinations of active variables.
Research into the image of your organization, often benchmarked against competitors, is now commonplace. Usually a component of branding or reputation audits, there are now a raft of techniques that can be applied to create perceptual maps. We report the results of such studies so that senior management can create strategies either to close perception gaps (communications) or credentials gaps (service and quality enhancement).
The Knowledge Partnership has particular expertise in some increasingly important areas of research - pricing, naming and internal communications.
David Roberts has published a number of papers and spoken at several conferences on education fees and on pricing research techniques.
He has also advised over 30 education institutions on corporate naming and many others on the titles for specific courses and services.
Building on Stephen Holmes' original published research into the culture of education institutions, we are also well placed to evaluate issues such as internal communications, culture and market orientation.
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Further Education