NEWS RELEASE                                                                                                    JULY 2015

Standard Market Research Reports Are Only the Starting Point

Conventional market research reports on pumps, valves, filters, treatment and instrumentation have been the basis of strategic planning for many decades. But today the relative value of these reports has shrunk in comparison to new tools.

The best analogy is the product brochure. It is very desirable to prepare product brochures and to mail them to prospects. But power point presentations, emails, internet displays and many other tools have decreased the brochure importance. The same is true for conventional market research reports. They should be just one of the strategic planning tools. Inadequacies of the conventional market research report are:

• They do not reflect the latest intelligence
• They do not provide the specifics necessary for setting individual country, product and industry quotas

The knowledge explosion makes tremendous amounts of useful strategic data available. Plant environmental and operating permits are hundreds of pages in length with detailed information on existing and planned process equipment as well as specific limits on modes of operation and effluent quality. Municipal water boards post minutes of meetings with details on expansion plans and problems. Bid reviews supply competitor prices. Publicly held companies provide continuing updates of their expansion plans.

Millions of pages are added to the internet in one form or another each month. They contain valuable competitor, regulatory, technical and commercial information. The flow control and treatment markets are often changed by technology improvements. News on these improvements is not limited to European and American sources. China is generating large amounts of valuable technical analysis and is moving forward with the most sophisticated technology such a zero liquid discharge systems (ZLD).

Strategic planners need to work with their sales, marketing and engineering counterparts to take advantage of this knowledge explosion. The result can be market forecasts with enough detail to set realistic quotas for the local salesmen. The resultant analyses should be detailed enough to set research and promotion budgets.

Holistic Approach to Market Research

This effort will be costly but, if the result is not only good intelligence but actionable information resulting in sales, the value well exceeds the cost.

McIlvaine provides the services to achieve this holistic approach. Specific choices can be found under:

Markets    Databases     People