Strategic Awareness, Evaluation & Planning

We've observed that strategic leadership depends heavily on the company fully understanding buying behaviour, as well as market trends and dynamics. Armed with reliable and convincing competitive intelligence, strategic leaders invariably excel at developing, implementing, and monitoring sound market/business strategies, which, in turn, leads to increased sales and profitability. Market research and value measurement reduces market risks enabling strategic leaders to proceed confidently with their creative plans and innovative products/services.

Strategic Leadership Requires Proper Measurement

All successful business activity demands the discipline of setting relevant, obtainable and measureable goals, and strategic planning is no exception. Given the vagaries of competitive markets and constantly shifting demographics, proper measurement is needed to avoid miss steps. Without timely and relevant measurement, the company can not:

• set measurable objectives or evaluate goal compliance.
• determine the relative success or failure of key marketing programs.
• reliably revise strategies to meet new challenges.

Research Designed to Produce Actionable Information

In creating scripts, we ask our clients what action they would take if all respondents answered "yes" to a given question versus if they all said "no." Because if management would not react to this difference in response, the question should not be asked.

We are often asked to evaluate a product's market potential, to determine market trends/opportunities, and to assess our client's strength and weaknesses relative to competition. These types of studies are routinely conducted, not only to measure specific programs, but to provide our clients with sufficient actionable information to properly evaluate strategic options and minimize the business risk related to hard decisions.

We've helped clients implement total quality management (TQM) with consultation and research designed to define customer requirements and to measure the extent to which firm's meet or exceed customer expectations. Much of our research measures attitudes and perceptions among customers and markets. This enables our clients to develop more relevant selling messages and to establish measurement programs for tracking their performance.

Research Designed To Improve Business Strategies

We believe research should be linked directly to business strategies. Aegis Marketing. professionals have supplied vital information and consultation to clients in the following areas:

• Define organizational architecture and vision
• Improve strategic evaluation and planning
• Understand market trends and dynamics
• Conduct market audits and value measurement

Specific analytical approaches are listed below:

• Defining "served markets" (what business your company really competes in)
• Defining satisfaction and performance criteria that have a direct bearing on company sales
• Evaluating business strategies (strategic congruency, performance against stated objectives, goal compliance)
• SWOT analysis (competive strengths & weakness, market opportunities & threats)
• STEEPLE analysis (impact of external conditions: social, technology, economic, environmental, people, legal, etc.)
• Scenario (future world) analysis
• Perceptual maps (product positioning studies)
• Understanding the buying process (who, what, where, when, how)

Aegis' research capabilities fall into the general categories of product planning, market development, strategic planning, competitive intelligence gathering, and communication evaluation. Within these topical areas, we offer a wide range of specific types of research services customer/market satisfaction studies, market opportunity/segmentation/share studies, context (content) analysis, lost sales analysis, Delphi (innovation) research, demand/pricing analysis, global (international) research, magazine readership studies, product positioning studies, merger/acquisition research, attitudinal/opinion research, corporate image studies, distributor/dealer research, conjoint (trade off) analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, trade show evaluations, and other studies.