StrategicImpact™ Process
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Why Invest In The Decision Analyst StrategicImpact™ Process? Because You Have A Lot At Stake.
Strategic research initiatives are highly visible and require buy-in from a variety of high-level stakeholders in order to be successful. Your company is investing significant resources and is counting on a positive outcome. As a stakeholder yourself, you need to ensure that everyone involved is aligned on the business needs and on how the research results will be leveraged to help drive your business forward.
Our system for gathering knowledge and gaining alignment among key stakeholders leads to a deeper understanding of the business needs and opportunities from every perspective, including consumers, employees, upper management, and shareholders. The goal of this multi-step process is to build consensus about study objectives and desired outcomes among the upper management and the research team, and to improve the chances that employees will support and act on the research findings. Ultimately, it helps guide your team toward effective move-forward plans with the greatest potential for strategic impact.
StrategicImpact™ Phases
To achieve the best results, strategic engagements typically include all six of these phases:
- Align: Kickoff workshop with your cross-functional team to thoroughly discuss the business need(s) and establish success criteria.
- Explore: In-depth exploration of attitudes, needs, habits, and motivations of market audiences. Often includes internal or external business stakeholder interviews to explore their expectations.
- Quantify: Rigorous, large-scale research initiative among consumer audiences, including in-depth analyses. May also include interaction with, or mapping results to, a customer and/or prospect database.
- Analyze: Dig deeper into the intricacies of the survey outcomes and associated consumer needs, desires, mindsets, and emotions. Often includes building rich personas or profiles of target segments, a deeper understanding of consumer decision processes, etc.
- Activate: A cross-functional collaborative workshop to help integrate learning into your corporate plans. Research must lead to decisions and to actions.
- Monitor: Following activation, key performance metrics should be measured routinely to ensure successful strategic outcomes.
Apply The Process To Solve Business Problems
This process can be applied to any large strategic research initiative a company undertakes. Here are some examples of tough business issues that our clients have been able to address through this system:
- Segmenting the market to identify the most promising target audience(s).
- Who are they, and how do we reach them?
- What messages will be most compelling to them?
- Which of our current products or services will address their needs?
- What new product development opportunities exist to reach these customers?
- Are there new adjacent business opportunities we should look to acquire/merge with?
- Innovating to meet new demands or attract new customers—from co-creation with exceptionally innovative consumers through forecasting and test market monitoring.
- Optimizing part of the company’s business.
- How do we optimize our product line to maximize sales or profits?
- Are we leaving money on the table? What is the optimal pricing strategy for each of our product lines?
- Which services should be bundled together to reach the broadest audience or the most profitable audience, or both?
- Which communication strategy and components will drive the most business and increase the company’s bottom line? Which combination of these factors will maintain the strength of our brand loyalty to reduce churn?
- Identifying the right domestic or global markets to pursue as part of the company’s growth strategy.
Strategy Research Services
The more people who are relying on the research, the more strategic the research, the more important it is to ensure that the key stakeholders buy into the research and know what to do with the results. Decision Analyst has over 40 years of experience in conducting strategic research. If you would like to discuss the StrategicImpact™ process or a specific project, please contact Bonnie Janzen, Executive Vice President (bjanzen@decisionanalyst.com), or Felicia Rogers, Executive Vice President (frogers@decisionanalyst.com) , or by calling 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.