ONS is led by ex-strategy consultants with the shared vision of providing cutting-edge research to decision makers, via access to a distributed team and reliable as well as credible market data from leading research databases such as FactSet, Statista and IBIS World.
Our market research practice can help you identify, review, segment, and capture market growth opportunities in order to support your go-to-market strategy.
We provide research support to banks, hedge funds, private equity firms etc and also startups looking to assess the feasibility of their new business idea. Banks need research analysts for their M&A clients to identify potential merger or acquisition targets. Similarly, startups need market data in order to identify the total market of their product/service and measure their obtainable share in that market. We use databases such as Statista, IBIS World, MarketResearch, PitchBook and Mergent Intellect to complete our projects.
OUR RESEARCH DELIVERABLES
MARKET SIZING AND ANALYSIS
FEASIBILITY STUDY
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY
MARKETING PLANS
WHY DO STARTUPS NEED TO STUDY THE MARKET
As a startup, before you fully commit to a project it is critical to establish its viability by conducting research. The aim of this research is to answer certain questions
1Who are your customers?
You need to know who your target customers are and build a profile by looking at age, gender, income, employment, ethnicity. For eg, someone looking to open a sandwich bar in the corporate center of a city will identify corporates working in the same area aged 22-55 years as their target customers
2What do they buy now?
You need to look at what these customers buy at present. For the sandwich bar owner it might be another cafe down the road. The objective is to describe their buying habits relating to your product or service, including how much they buy, their preferred suppliers, the most popular features and the prevailing price points.
3Why do they buy?
Establish the reason for their demand for your product. Does it solve a specific problem? Answers will depend on the product and its uses but is greatly dependent on individual customer habits.
4What will make them buy from you?
This would be a tough one. If the sandwich bar sells ordinary sandwiches like all other cafes in the area, why would people buy from here? What’s the special sauce? You need to have a think about your unique value proposition, marketing plans etc
5What is the market potential?
More commonly known as the TAM, SAM and SOM analysis. This is where you look at how big the market is. If you’re selling a product that only a small section of the population needs then maybe its not a good idea. This step involves determining the total available market size, total serviceable market and the obtainable market.
6Who are your competitors?
As they say ‘know thy enemies’. You need to be fully aware of the capabilities and offerings of your competitors. What are they doing that’s working? What are they doing that’s not? Learn from their mistakes, and be better at what they do best.
7What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
It is equally important to know your own strengths and weaknesses as well. And so is identifying growth opportunities as well as risk factors that impact your business
WHAT DOES A GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY MEAN?
Simply put, Go-to-market or go-to-market strategy is the plan of an organization, utilizing their inside and outside resources (e.g. sales, distribution, marketing), to deliver their unique value proposition to customers and attain a considerable market share. When you develop your Go-to-Market strategy you need to be able to answer three questions:
What to sell?
Who to sell to?
How to sell it?
Once you know have a basic idea of what you are selling, who your target customers are and how you want to sell it, you dive into the more complicated questions:
How to develop a market entry strategy that suits your business model as well as target customers?
How do you create a compelling value proposition addressing the needs and requirements of your customers?
What is the size of the potential opportunity in your specific market?
What should be the roadmap of your product (or service) launch in the market?
How should you set your growth KPIs? Should you focus your business strategy on growing your market share, increasing penetration, or finding a new niche?
Which potential partners are best suited to help your business compete more effectively?
HOW CAN WE HELP YOU GO-TO-MARKET?
MARKET ASSESSMENT
We help you understand the market dynamics and diagnostics by identifying particular complexities, nuances, key indicators and unique characteristics. All for a successful market entry.
PARTNER EVALUATION
Going to market is not an easy job and you will need help with that. We help identify suitable partners who have the right capabilities and expertise that you need in order to succeed in the target.
MARKET ENTRY STRATEGY
We help you with your launch strategy by identifying growth opportunities within the market. A market entry strategy means determining how you can access the market and that greatly depends on the market’s structure. There’s four types of markets:
Existing Market
Resegmented Market
New Market
Clone Market
LET US HELP YOU CREATE THE PERFECT MARKETING PLAN
Marketing plans are an essential element of your go-to-market strategy as they help you refine your strategy to reflect the industry you are in, whether you’re selling b to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B), and how big your digital presence is. There are six essential elements to your marketing plan:
Business Summary
Business Initiatives
Target Market
Market Strategy
Budget
Marketing Channels
We help you formulate a customised marketing plan that is tailor-made to your specific business plan and company objectives. As strategy consultants, we have the right mix of skills and expertise to guide you (whether you’re a startup or established company) and help you develop an effective marketing plan.
See How We Can Help You
OUR PROCESS
We have tried to keep our process as simple, smooth and collaborative as possible.
INITIAL REQUEST RECEIVED
The process starts when you fill one of our contact forms or email/call us with your requirements. At this stage, all we ask for is basic details like your name, email address, company name, industry, service (market research, go-to-market) and a brief description of your requirement along with any attachments you might want to send. You then directly book an initial consultation with us here.
1
INITIAL CONSULTATION
The purpose of this call is to understand your current situation, story, background and requirements. The agenda is very high-level, and the primary objective is to ascertain project scope, timeline, milestones and budget.
2
FOLLOW-UP/INFORMATION GATHERING
Post initial-consultation, we move on to gathering relevant information from you about the business. This can be in the form of a questionnaire or interview(s) with relevant stakeholders - whichever is more appropriate. We might also need to request for confidential financial documents.
3
SUBMISSION OF FIRST DRAFT
Based on our initial discussions around timelines and milestones, we deliver a first draft as per the agreed milestone and project scope.
4
FINAL VERSION SUBMISSION
Post revisions and iterations based on our discussions with you and your team, we deliver the final product. Most of our reports and marketing plans are based in MS Word
The time taken varies from project to project. Most of the time spent on a project is driven by the groundwork we have to do which includes information gathering from company stakeholders, the target market, industry and number of products/services offered.
Our pricing mechanism isn’t one-size-fits-all and we review each project’s scope individually to quote a price. Prices are driven by factors such as geographic locations, products/services offered, and industry niche.
We are here to serve our customers and deliver on their requirements. Our process is very agile and can accommodate any requirements you may have. We provide a financial analysis of the company feasibility as well if requested.
We have taken corporate licenses with most of the reputable databases including Statista, IBIS, PitchBook, FactSet and Technavio but do not provide our clients access to these sources since that is company property. We do however include snippets of relevant graphs and tables in our reports wherever required and reference them to the source.
We can definitely provide our input on market positioning based on the research that we do but cannot help you actually design and develop the company branding
