Market Assessment International

Market Assessment Program (MAP) Process

Below are some of the strategic and tactical problems that are routinely faced by most businesses:

Product/Service Concept Verification
Product/Service Feature Definition
Marketing Strategies and Forecasting
Competitive Analysis
Pricing Strategies
Product/Service Positioning
Market Demand Analysis
Sales Improvement Strategies

Resellers Motivations & Attitudes
Product Distribution Strategy
Market Share Improvement
Customer Services
Value-Added Professional Services
Customer Satisfaction
New Product Release Monitoring
Customer Profiling , and others

A Market Assessment Program is a powerful decision-making and problem-solving tool designed for and used by corporations and organizations to assist them in guiding their business strategies. It uses MAI’s special Customer Research methodology and has proved to be most useful for the above applications by letting the targeted market define the value and shape the solution of the business proposition.
             
A Market Assessment Program features the following:

1.  Strategy Session With the Client.

The purpose of this working meeting is to define the objectives of the Program. Special attention is given to the business aspects surrounding the goals of the Program, as expressed by the client. The result of this session is often a refinement and clarification of the issues at hand, for the benefit of both MAI and the client.

2.  Design of an Inquiry Schedule.

The purpose of the Inquiry Schedule is to translate the client’s problem into a set of questions to be answered by the targeted market or targeted audience. The inquiry is scripted and designed to achieve multiple goals: to get genuine answers from the respondents, keep the discussion within the average attention span of a typical respondent, to make the interaction interesting to the respondents, etc. A typical inquiry schedule calls for 100 to 150 answer fields, about a third of which are open-ended

The Inquiry Schedule is made available to the client for review before execution of the Inquiry phase.

3.  The Inquiry Phase.

The inquiry phase takes place over a two to four week period. Depending on the particulars of the Program, the number of respondents is between fifty and several hundred.

The inquiry phase is executed by a team of MAI-trained interviewers, all of whom all have college degrees, experience in keeping control of a discussion, and the appropriate background in marketing or related fields. Each inquiry is conducted as a one-on-one telephone discussion between a member of the inquiry team and a respondent. The structure of the discussion is both informal and tightly controlled. The typical duration is between 20 and 40 minutes per respondent.

4.  Program Management.

For each Program,  a special MAI Program team is assembled. The team comprises two MAI executives and the inquiry staff, generally between four and eight members total. Over the course of the Program, the team meets internally at least three times: first at the outset of the inquiry phase, in order to review the Program’s objectives as defined by the client; second, after a few days into the inquiry phase in order to get some feedback on both the contents and the mechanics of the program (some adjustments of the inquiry schedule may then take place); and finally, upon termination of the inquiry phase, to start developing tentative conclusions.

The client is kept informed regularly on the progress of the Program.

5.  Data Analysis.

This phase of the Program is the responsibility of a senior MAI staff. The interviewers’ output represents a file with at least 5,000 fields, and up to 100,000 fields, often a significant number of which are qualitative in nature and/or answers to open-ended questions. Specially developed software is then used to assist in retrieving, classifying, and correlating the raw data.

6.  Findings Report.

The Findings Report (typically between 50 and 80 pages) consists of two main sections. The Detailed Analysis examines individually each topic of the Program and contains relevant tables, explanatory text and direct respondents’ quotes; this part of the Findings Report contains in effect the raw data as it came from the respondents themselves and can be used by the client for further analysis. The first section of the Findings Report is the Executive Perspective, whose purpose is to bring all relevant data together, to draw higher-level conclusions and make recommendations, and to suggest tentative operational options.

The Findings Report is always the result of a team effort. To ensure unbiased results, both a bottom-up and a top-down analyses are made of the data by two different MAI senior executives; to insure consistency, both sections have to reconcile perfectly.

The Findings Report is typically available to the client between four and six weeks following the initial strategy session. For emergency situations, special arrangements can be made to have the Findings Report delivered within seven to ten days.

The Findings Report is only one of the deliverables; the other is the presentation of the findings to the client organization.

7.    Presentation to the Client.

Following the delivery of the Findings Report to the client, MAI will provide, as integral part of the Program, a presentation of the findings to the client organization. This presentation can be offered either as a "working" session (questions and answers) or as a formal presentation to upper management, depending on the client’s choice and objectives.

Following the presentation, the MAI Program team remains available to the client to answer any further questions.

8.    Quality Assurance.

As with any other product, each MAP goes through a quality assurance (QA) phase aimed at making sure that the final conclusions and recommendations are consistent with the answers from the field, solidly documented in the Findings Report and in line with the client’s expectations. The QA team consists of the three MAI principals.

9.  Fixed Cost.

A Market Assessment Program is packaged as a single fixed-cost product with no unscheduled expenses. The major elements affecting the price are the number of respondents scheduled in the Program, the international contents of the Program, and the number of markets or submarkets under consideration.

10.  Additional Business Strategy Consulting Services.

Upon termination of a Market Assessment Program, the MAI team is available to provide the client with added assistance in the form of additional presentations to management, participation in the client’s internal meetings, support in devising the most effective business strategies and help in implementing invoiced on a time and expenses basis.