Competitive Intelligence

The Challenge

A global investor was offered an opportunity in a potentially disruptive, but unproven technology. They urgently needed to learn if and how successful the new product could be.

How would buyers in key markets react to the new product? What market share could it achieve at either a premium price or at a disruptive low price, and in what time frame?

Our Approach

We created a consumer-facing product stimulus from publicly available PR material of the disruptive competitor and built prediction markets for relevant category in two of the world’s largest markets.

Rather than just asking for purchase intent, we used our LURE test pattern (Liking, Uniqueness, Relevance, Effect) to generate a holistic consumer response to the new product’s attributes and capabilities. Finally, the super-forecasters in our crowd predicted consensus market volumes at two price points for short and long-term horizons.

Using these data points we built a simulator of consumer demand, base case value and volume shares dependent on price points, supplemented by high and low case scenarios, as well as estimates for the cannibalisation of the client’s current product.

The Result

Our client could plug these numbers directly into their investment evaluation model and calculate cash flows in consideration of expected production cost and scale economies. Qualitative insights into consumers’ true motivation for product take-up and rejection gave the client a strategic advantage in negotiations with the target.