market analysis Strategic Marketing Process

Identify unique characteristics of your brand. Communicate a distinctive market position. That’s what successful marketing is all about. However, keeping current with target audience needs, holding competitive pressures at bay and communicating effectively with customers, can be challenging at best. Helping our clients cut through the marketing clutter and focus on the most crucial elements of differentiation is what we’re all about. It all happens with market analysis™, our strategic branding process developed in 1994 and validated by over one hundred companies and organizations worldwide.

Immerse ourselves. Throughout the market analysis process, we gain consensus regarding pertinent issues and opportunities, then test and verify our findings by interviewing constituents of influence, including selected employees, customers, prospects and partners. What we learn through one-on-one interviews often reveals the most critical pieces to the communications puzzle—eureka!

Develop “a personality”. Utilizing market analysis, we put words around our clients’ value proposition, create the positioning statement for the organization, tweak and mold that statement for each target audience, evaluate its potential vis a vis competitors and reverse engineer a go-to-market strategy.

Deliver results. Regardless of the medium, (advertising, electronic news, PR, event marketing) a unique and distinctive brand builds awareness and creates profitable enterprises. Simply stated, share of market equals share of mind.

The market analysis Experience

To initiate the process, we conduct an intensive workshop with our clients at an offsite location. The client's management team and FSM Consulting’s creative team participate in the adventure. Our tightly facilitated discussion covers:

• Vision and goals—Big Hairy Audacious Goals
• Positioning issues
• Historical perspective
• Core values and beliefs
• Public relations/external relations objectives
• Marketing objectives
• Audiences served (current and future)
• Ideal customers
• Ideal customer characteristics
• Competitive analysis/competitive map
• Discussion of other organizations to emulate
• Service offering attributes and methodologies
• Uniquely identifiable differentiators
• Talent pool—the organization's ability to promote and support its offerings

 Market Research Data

Our objective is to test the viability of our preliminary position; to learn the most about a client's ideal or target audience in a short period of time; and to gain an understanding of competitive or other market or legislative pressures.

Competitive Intelligence

• Collect and review industry information, press articles, and competitive information
• Evaluate strengths and weaknesses in positioning and presentation
• Review any research data previously collected
• Identify and review industry publications, associations, analyst reports, trends and other indicators

Verification through Primary Research

FSM Consulting’s marketing professionals conduct extensive interviews with representatives of your target audience, and other influencers who have first hand experience with your offerings.

Deliverables

Your market analysis™ develops into a graphically presented booklet that supports the most desirable positioning strategies and suggests how to achieve an organization’s objectives. It includes:

• Branding strategy
• A high-level positioning platform
• Subsequent messages by market or audience segment
• Marketing roadmap of objectives and timeframes
• PR strategy and media recommendations
• Tangible examples of how the strategy rolls out into marketing initiatives

At FSM Consulting, our intention is to utilize a creative and systematic approach that ultimately assists a client in meeting and exceeding its business and marketing communications objectives for a fixed period of time and beyond, to the extent that we can define future goals. We truly believe in this process and know that it has significantly helped every client we have worked with. We look forward to working with you and every member of your team and know that this will be a memorable and rewarding experience for everyone.