Need to size your market? Keen to get a long-term view of how its structure or value may change?

Wearing our strategic marketing consultancy and research consultancy hats, KAE can provide a holistic macro view on any market or industry – thanks to expertise in marketing strategy, competitive intelligence, expert interviewing, desk research and primary research.

Typically – but not exclusively – our projects may involve one or a combination of:

Market sizing

• Quantifying the value of your market today and tomorrow

Opportunity assessment

• Identifying the opportunity and how you can take advantage of it

Competitive intensity

• Quantifying concentration of share and how much you can feasibly take

Driver analysis

• Understanding what you must get right to feasibly attack this market

Critical success factors

• Identifying the factors you can take advantage of and what you need to factor into long-term planning

Recent project highlights

Our Client: Digital Marketing Services

• Quantifying the growth potential of Europe’s digital communications market and its effect on core non-digital lines of business for a digital marketing services provider

 Our Client: SaaS and Applications Outsourcing

• Creating a sequential targeting plan, with segments in order of attractiveness over time, for the go-to-market plan of a global technology super brand’s new BU

 Our Client: Private Medical Insurance

• Market sizing and driver analysis to identify current competitive shares and long-term profitability in the European private medical insurance market

Are competitors actively targeting your channel? What can you learn from new entrants?

Our competitive intelligence experts can tell you.

Whether you want to benchmark across a range of KPI’s or identify a competitor’s likely strategy, KAE’s intelligent and exhaustive competitor research will uncover their overall performance, organisation, sales and marketing activity, customer reputation, pricing, product portfolio and more.

From here, we can build a clear, comprehensive view of your competitors’ current priorities, capabilities and most likely future moves.

Of course, we’re a strategic marketing consultancy too, so we can then assess the significance of our findings for your company and help you to develop effective counter-measures.

Recent project highlights

Our Client: Major correspondent bank

• When a client with an enviable emerging markets franchise sought to stem market share erosion, we guided them to improve customer experience and enhance pricing in order to establish a more competitive position in the market. 

Our Client: Pharmaceutical company

• When preparing for an important product launch for the over-the-counter market, our client heard rumours of a ‘me too’ product launch. We armed the client with a clear exposition of the competitive threat, with which it was able to review and adapt its plans to take into account the likely competitor activity.

Our Client: Energy provider

• In a highly competitive market, our client sought intelligence on how its key competitors communicate with customers and prospects. Our research and recommendations enabled the client to reassess its activities and redesign its material – improving related sales and increasing customer retention.

Can your channel articulate your points of difference? How can you increase your share of recommendation within your reseller network?

An effective channel management strategy and win-win strategic partnerships can dramatically move the needle. KAE has a long and successful track record of framing, crafting and developing mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships between organisations.

Whether we’re improving channel performance, developing accreditation protocols or rationalising existing protocols, our fluency in this area has effected several game-changer innovations across the FS, Mobile and Technology markets.

Recent project highlights

Our Client: Retail Bank

• Crafting and developing a new consumer payment proposition between a leading UK bank and mobile operator

Our Client: Global printer manufacturer

• Helping a global B2B printer manufacturer increase preference within its reseller network and realigned channel marketing activities

Our Client: Telecommunications

• Helping a global network infrastructure brand improve its channels’ ability to craft cohesive and compelling sales arguments

How can we stimulate a step change in innovation? Do we really understand the total user experience? What should our idea screening process look like?

Understanding the new product development and new services development process is business critical. KAE has been behind many major NPD and NSD success stories – thanks to our end to end fluency which includes expertise in the qualitative and quantitative techniques that incrementally refine and adjust to maximise consumer appeal and forecast diffusion.

We also believe in challenging the status quo. We encourage clients to take ‘left field’ thinking from adjacent markets and new trends as a source of inspiration, and advise learning from competitors and best-in-class brands on how to optimise internal idea screening and business case development protocols.

Recent projects highlights

Our Client: Global Hotel chain

• Enabling an international hotel corporation to develop innovative service concepts that boosted its market standing

Our Client: Digital TV Broadcaster

• Working with a digital TV broadcaster to launch a new product successfully that helped increase its lead of the UK’s digital entertainment business

 Our Client: Financial Services

• Helping a new entrant into the UK retirement income market launch a new proposition with a world-class adviser service platform

How aligned are you to key drivers? What associations must you build? How can you assess your brand’s extension capacity?

Thanks to absolute fluency in the challenges and nuances of brand strategy, brand management and brand research, these are the kinds of questions we love to answer.

We pride ourselves on unearthing clear opportunities for our clients to create truly inspiring brand concepts which penetrate their consumers’ consciousness. We’re known for providing points of inspiration for creative brand development, based upon rigorous interpretation of qualitative and quantitative findings.

And we bring our extensive customer experience skills to bear in order to unpick customer journeys and understand how holistic attitudes have been formed – as well as the right response to addressing deficiencies in brands’ touch points.

For these reasons, we’re the ‘go to’ for some of the leading brands in our core sectors.

Recent project highlights

Our Client: Video on Demand

• Creating the first evidence-based global brand strategy for a leading Video on Demand service which provided clear recommendations on content strategy, and how to balance advertising volumes with the user experience

Our Client: Mobile handsets

• Helping a leading handset manufacturer restructure its architecture to maximise coherence and simplify consumers’ decision-making processes at POS

Our Client: Mobile Handsets

• Helping a leading technology firm assess its capability to extend into several new markets and guiding selection of co-branding partners to address clear attribute deficiencies

How do you segment your B2B market? How can you optimise your customer research spend? How can you get under your customers’ skin…?

We’re customer marketing and customer research experts – so when it comes to answering your questions, we combine fluency in the research process with an intuitive understanding of how you will use our findings.

Our bread and butter is strategic projects such as B2C or B2B segmentations, but we conduct research projects across the customer spectrum – from pure play customer experience to key driver analysis to profitability modelling.

We succeed in this space where other agencies often fail.

Why? Because we focus on stakeholder understanding and we’re committed to finding the optimal approach to describe the consumer in a compelling, actionable and tailored way.

Recent project highlights

Our Client: Retail Bank

• Auditing the entire research and customer insight function of a leading UK bank and providing key recommendations on how to realign spend to better serve the strategic direction of the business

Our Client: Telecommunications

• Providing a leading telecommunications brand with a clear view of how to drive a greater level of consumer self-service, by identifying barriers and potential triggers to adoption

Our Client: Retail Bank

• Conducting a major customer experience project for a leading retail bank, isolating key barriers within the customer journey and developing ‘wow factor’ response options

How do we migrate customers to a new pricing structure? What is the optimal approach to bundling?

These are just some of the questions answered by our dedicated specialists in pricing strategy and pricing research.

Experts in advanced statistical modelling, fluent in relevant survey techniques, our team provides clients with a clear, quantified view of the optimal pricing strategy across highly complex product and service portfolios.

And when we talk about clients, we’re talking about some of Europe’s leading B2C and B2B organisations – among whom we enjoy a reputation for pricing expertise.

Recent project highlights

Client: Mobile handsets

• Quantifying the price point potential and impact on preference for bundling differing types of application with handsets for a global mobile brand

Client: Sattelite TV

• Developing an optimal triple play pricing structure for a major European digital subscription TV provider

Client: Telecoms network infrastructure

• Improving a network provider’s ability to sustain margin in major enterprise engagements by using a value component model within sales processes

What factors are causing churn? How can you improve conversion rates? How can you improve your sales argumentation?

As experts in customer acquisition and customer retention, our answers to these types of questions have led to a great many success stories in proposition development.

Our fluent understanding encompasses the complete development and refinement process – right through to eventual forecasting, modelling and business case development. Many of our clients have deployed our desk research team to challenge current industry conventions by developing global best practice insights before primary research.

Others have benefitted from our ability to identify drivers of disaffection or resonance of a competitive offering, and shape client response accordingly.

So how can we help you?

Recent project highlights

Our Client: Retail Bank

• Creating a new consumer financial services card proposition for a leading bank and UK mobile operator which was designed to maximise both customer acquisition customer retention of teenage PAYG and contract customers

Our Client: Car Insurance

• Helping a leading consumer car insurance brand develop a new pan European proposition and supported agencies and brand teams with insight throughout the development of the high spend comms strategy

Our Client: Pay TV Broadcaster

• Enabling a leading Pay TV broadcaster develop, refine and model the success of their new HD TV subscription service