Understanding your market and its markets
What does it mean to understand your market and your markets for a B2B/B2G company?
- Understanding your markets means first of all understanding their structure and the division into different “market segments”.
- It then means identifying the influential players and understanding their objectives and their role in what is often a complex “sectoral ecosystem” such as that of civil aeronautics, which will be different from that of military aeronautics.
- It also means identifying current or potential competitors who may also be influential players in structuring the market.
- It also means understanding the economic and technological dynamics, i.e. being able to anticipate in which economic and technological directions the market will move in the future
- it means understanding how this dynamic, driven by causes (drivers), will translate into identifiable and measurable trends.
- Finally, understanding the market means measuring the overall potential and the potential available to the company, taking into account its strengths and those of its products, at different levels of detail (for a single product, a segment, the total market).
Specificities of high-tech B2B / B2G
The specificity of high-tech B2B/B2G lies here:
- The complexity of ecosystems and value chains
- The difficulty of segmenting markets in a relevant way
- The difficulty of anticipating the impact of innovations at the right time
- The difficulty of identifying where new competitors might emerge
- the lack or absence of public information, with or without figures, on markets that are often confidential in every sense of the word.
We will then rest:
- Generic studies which are often not sufficiently granular (except perhaps in certain IT sectors which give rise to numerous accessible studies carried out by specialised bodies) but which can give broad trends
- On specifically initiated ad hoc studies
- On market data analysis, which is beginning to spread in technology, even if it is not as advanced as in B2C
- On customer interviews or feedback from user groups
- On concept or value proposition tests
- On feedback from product demonstrations or tests
- … and above all on the ability to cooperate internally to interpret all these sources and make the right decisions based on the experience acquired over time.
