Prior to launching a new product or innovation, it’s critical to understand the market landscape and all the customers, or stakeholders, within that market. Market landscape analysis is the first step in market development. It’s where we identify the key stakeholders, and uncover the true needs, barriers, and opportunities in the marketplace.
Once defined, landscape insights lay the foundation for market development planning and, ultimately, inform the market development strategy.
Markets are complex, adaptive ecosystems made up of many different audiences. We refer to these various groups as stakeholders. For example, in the healthcare and pharmaceutical spaces, stakeholders include patients, as well as healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies and payers, advocacy groups, medical associations and more. Each stakeholder has its own incentives – ranging from financial to altruistic – as well as market regulations, standards and practices that guide their perspectives and engagement on the issues that shape the market.
The goal of market mapping is to understand the interplay of these various stakeholder groups and the issues they care about, as well as identify barriers or opportunities in the current environment that can, and should, be addressed prior to launching a new product.
We achieve this by answering the following questions:
Understanding each stakeholder group’s beliefs, interests and attitudes starts within the knowledge contained within your own organization. We meet with internal leaders from multiple departments and functions, such as marketing, operations, research & development, communications and regulatory affairs to gain qualitative and quantitative assessments about each stakeholder group. Leaders are empowered to not only explore the current environment, but to identify challenges or areas of opportunity, always offering their perspective on the stakeholders they know best.
By consulting a cross-functional team, we develop a thorough understanding of the stakeholders and the relationships between them. These internal stakeholder insights are then blended with existing external research, reports, papers, case studies, policy landscapes, the activities of industry or advocacy groups and, if necessary, interviews with external experts, to build a broad, integrated, “big picture” perspective on the market.
The output of our landscape insights efforts is a clear picture of the landscape, the key players, their interests, the issues and potential levers of change. This landscape analysis synthesizes existing materials, but places it in the broader multi-stakeholder context and looks at all of the opportunities and barriers that exist to creating change. Ultimately, it is an actionable picture of the playing field you are looking to change by bringing innovation into the world.
To learn more about how Orangefiery can help your organization develop a thorough understanding of the marketplace and its stakeholders, complete the form below or give us a call at 415-384-8677.