Market Intelligence Consulting

We want every solution to become the best version of itself before you fully invest in it.

Markets, technologies, trends, and customer expectations are always evolving. What’s tried and tested for a time may no longer hold water. To stay ahead of these changes, businesses must keep their fingers on the pulse of their industries — and beyond.

Are you well aware of your strengths and weaknesses?.

We will help you uncover them and how they relate to those of your competitors, so you can leverage them in a smart way.

Do you know how your solution fares in relation to others?.

We will compare your product, service or idea to existing alternatives to quickly map potential gaps and fill them.

Are you sure you’re operating on the best market?.

We will check whether your environment works for or against you and suggest other potential areas on case it's the latter option.

What user challenges does your solution solve?.

We will go directly to your target users to see how they are or would be using your solution to easily win them over afterwards.

Helping a growing company set up an effective user research process

Fundid wanted to make the right next step for their growth. They needed to verify whether there is a need for their product but they didn't have a method, process, or tools to do this.

Netguru came in to provide help in three main areas:

Hypothesis validation
Facilitating the discovery of any unknown needs of female entrepreneurs in the US so that Fundid would be able to define the scope of its MVP and prepare a product development roadmap
Consultancy regarding best practices in user research and supporting the client in building an in-house user research team

FUNDiD - Example of Market Intelligence Consulting

We’re grateful that Netguru was able to teach us a process to understand these business owners thinking about risk, cash-flow, business growth and access to capital and has guided every aspect of our product.

Stefanie Sample
CEO at Fundid

Identify gaps in the market.

These gaps are just opportunities waiting for you to make use of them. When identified properly, they can be the difference between failure and success.

Discover what customers want.

Don't just take their word for it, but dig deeper and make the implicit — explicit. Oftentimes, it's about meeting the needs that so far have gone unvoiced.

Mitigate and manage risks.

Awareness of risks related to the realization of your idea, as well as a mitigation plan in case things go wrong can be a crucial aspect of your competitive advantage.

Reduce costs and speed up delivery.

Achieve it by proactively identifying challenges early, addressing them before the become a nuisance, or — simply — doing it right from the very beginning.

USE: our holistic approach to market intelligence consulting

The proprietary USE framework created by Netguru ICON helps us navigate any challenge comprehensively, from understanding, through strategizing and all the way to execution.

Understand. We gather the intelligence most pertinent to your current or prospective business and solutions.
Strategize. Based on the data, we provide specific recommendations of the best course of action.
Execute. We turn the recommendations into actionable next steps to best leverage the findings.

Cornerstones of market intelligence

Contents

Market intelligence is a vast discipline that is based on the following four elements:

Competitor Intelligence: Enables you to shape your strategy by leveraging your own strengths and weaknesses in relation to those of your competitors.
Product Intelligence: Allows to increase the value you bring to your users by analyzing your own offering and how it compares to other available similar solutions.
Market Understanding: Has you observe and analyze your industry to discover where your users are the most active and meet them there.
Customer Understanding: Requires you identify what challenges your customers need support with and help them overcome it with your solution.

Why research matters to businesses?

Rather than relying on assumptions, entrepreneurs and executives must leverage hard evidence gathered through disciplined and structured research approaches. It’s rarely enough to collect publicly available data from online sources. Businesses must also engage with prospective customers at the earliest possible stage to observe them, solicit feedback, and test products before them.

See below why research is essential to prosperous businesses:

Research helps enterprises and startups mitigate and manage risks when creating a new product (or introducing iterations to existing ones).
Businesses can compare and contrast their ideas with competing offerings, which will help them identify gaps in the market (or niche markets) that they can exploit.
Research will open up insights on what customers want, what they don’t want, as well as what they need. Sometimes, it may even surface problems that customers didn't know they had.
By identifying challenges early on, businesses might be able to reduce costs and speed up delivery in the design and development of their product or service.

The principles of research for business

Our innovation consulting team wants every product idea or business concept to become the best version of itself before our clients and partners thoroughly invest in its development. These are the principles we adhere to when it comes to research:

Problem-driven: We focus our research on actual problems that our clients want to solve for their customers.
Customer-centric: Research should begin first by uncovering how best to solve customer problems, rather than going straight into how a product idea can find success in the market.
Collaborative: We design our research approach and methodologies with our clients, their customers, and other relevant stakeholders.
Actionable insight: We won’t simply present data. Our research delivers insights that businesses can act on to improve their products and services.
Anchored to the product lifecycle: We believe that businesses must strive to continuously carry out some form of methodical research throughout the lifecycle of a product or service.

What are the risks to lack of research?

When uncovering new opportunities, it can be tempting to jump straight into product conceptualization, design, and development. Having worked with a lot of founders and executives, we consider such enthusiasm an invaluable asset to any project.

However, this excitement can also push some to forego research and work on prototyping their product idea immediately. Alternatively, those that do some research do them half-heartedly and only rely on easily obtainable data. There are countless examples why this is a mistake. Here are the risks in not conducting proper research.

Lack of product-market fit: Without research, businesses may later find out that the very concept of their product doesn’t solve real problems for real customers. Even if it does, there may not be enough demand to make a business out of it.
Misalignment to customer segments: Without understanding customers enough, businesses run the risk of alienating certain audiences. Customers shouldn’t be placed in a single bucket. Whether through varying product configurations or marketing strategies, proper research informs businesses how they can best engage different customer segments.
Competitive disadvantage: Businesses can learn from the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors. Without researching your industry peers, you run the risk of launching a product that doesn’t stand out.
Cost overruns and delayed time-to-market: No business wants to spend on an idea that won’t sell. But even assuming there’s some product-market fit, lack of solid research can lead to operational and spending inefficiencies. Uncover the right features and configurations by testing them as early as possible.

Gather data about the market to make better business decisions

Gathering and analyzing market intelligence help decide on objectives and goals. It can help you determine which markets begin working in next by discovering the conditions, characteristics, and dynamics of the market.

Virtual try-on: Game Changer or Hype?

The advantages and shortcomings of virtual try-on apps, with insights backed by user interviews and UX audits of selected solutions.

Augmented reality and virtual reality markets have been estimated to be worth $3.79 billion in 2021, and predicted to grow to $17.86 billion in 2028, according to Reportlinker.
Netguru ran UX Audits of the AR & VR virtual try-on solutions offered by F.Hinds, Ray-ban, Charlotte Tilbury, Candere, Pandora, and Gucci to find the ultimate digital acceleration recipe for a successful VTO product.