Understanding your Target Market - A Case Study
Understanding your target market is a core element for your new market entry preparation. The more information and data that you have as you design your new entry strategy, the greater the chance of success.
OpenVentures was asked to do a market due diligence report on the European (excl. UK & IRL) online wedding market for a large online media group who owns some of the UK’s leading media brands. Their wedding brand is the UK’s leading portal. However, they have no presence outside of the UK. They were very concerned that the US market leader who already had a significant business in certain parts of Europe would move into the UK market and take significant market share.
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They felt that the solution was to develop some of the European markets so that their brand would be stronger and compete with the US brand better. They decided to buy an already established brand, instead of launching from scratch. However, for this strategy to work, they needed to understand whether the markets could cope with another big brand. The company that they thought might be interesting to buy was the 2nd market leader but was considerably smaller. The market leader’s revenue was approx. 20 times larger.
As OpenVentures has over 20 years’ experience with new market entry strategy, we were asked to do due diligence on the market and understand whether the European market could sustain 2 large wedding portals. The focus of this research was to be on France, Italy and Spain. They felt that we had the correct experience and skills in understanding the challenges that face a company entering a new market and hence we would be able to give a balanced analysis of the market and to make strategic recommendations.
The 1st task in any project is to understand the product/service and to have a good look at the competitors. OpenVentures then defined the objectives and delved deeper into the problem the client was trying to solve. When we do primary research, 2 things are of paramount importance, firstly the problem and secondly is the questionnaire. Primary research can often give you the wrong results if the questions are directed in a certain way.
Part 1 of the project was to research the markets, size, competitors, average spend on a wedding in that market, views to buying online, peoples attitude to weddings in those markets etc. Here we looked at research carried out by other firms and individuals.
Part 2 of the project was the primary research. We choose 10 companies for each country that had their company on the portal and rang them. The companies varied from venues to photographers to florists. We found that the venues had much greater experience in digital marketing and hence were much more willing to discuss what they felt about the different online wedding portals. Some paid for it and got ranked much higher, others who didn’t pay did not get ranked. We asked about the type of clients, whether they felt the service was value for money, whether the competition rang them to get them to upgrade and subscribe, we asked about their views on the different portals. We asked them about which marketing tools gave them the best returns. All in all, we had 8, carefully chosen questions and the interview lasted about 10 minutes.
Once we collated the information both primary and secondary, we were then able to analyse the information and data and write a report on the potential for them in some of the European markets and make recommendations.
OpenVentures continues to deliver to this company’s projects. “ it is easy to work with OpenVentures and the brief is carried out perfectly and on-time”. MD Media Brand.
Contact Us at sales@openventuresconsulting.com