QDI’s Market Insight Process

QDI has delivered actionable strategies to its clients for the past 20 years. The company’s unique way of thinking and working with clients delivers results and delights clients.  Actionable strategies which are the real output for clients, is a product of QDI’s ability to help clients create new insights about their markets.  These insights come from the practice of QDI’s Market Insight Process.

Let’s begin by recognizing the contradiction to traditional thinking:

Tom Morris of the Morris Institute of Human Values explains the contradiction between these two statements by saying:

“There are limits. Sometimes doing the same thing a second time when it hasn't worked the first is indeed just foolish. But sometimes it's shrewd. Wisdom consists, in part, in knowing the difference. Flexibility is a virtue. But in most matters, flexibility properly kicks in only after persistence has been given a fair chance.  Morris Institute for Human Values

To grow, organizations ultimately have to make decisions about how they deploy resources. This may mean trying something different or putting more resources behind what you are doing today.

Good decisions are the product of the wisdom built from years of experience in a company and its insight about what will be successful in the market.  Making the decisions that will drive growth will reqire believing something new about your markets or business that justifies the changes needed to be made.  QDI’s consulting services are built to support clients in this learning process, a process which leads to the New Insight that drives growth. 

Marketing Strategy Decisions

The goal of the research and the learning process is to create insights that lead to the decisions to deploy resources which create growth.  This decision process is graphically depicted below and shows QDI’s role to drive the learning process.   

Our consulting supports clients through the process of creating the insight that leads to decisions that drive growth.   The consulting is both content and process focused. 

• The content starts with your internal information, is augemented with market perspective through QDI’s Discovery Research and is synthesized into new insights through the application of QDI’s Value Management Tools. These tools provide the structure, modeling and interpretaion of the data that leads to these new insights.

• The process is the engagement with your decision-makers so that they believe these new insights and translate them into their decisions to deploy a new strategy / direction / product category to drive growth. 

QDI’s role in this process is to drive the learning that creates insight. QDI’s role is in the front end of the decision-making process. 
QDI:

• Collects and organizes the data input needed to develop understanding
• Synthesizes, analyzes and integrates this data into a meaningful understanding of the market
• Shares this process with the client’s decision making team so that they internalize the data and develop the understanding and the belief necessary to make decisions.

Learning is the output of QDI’s Discovery Research and the application of QDI’s Value Management Tools which provide the context to synthesize all the information that is collected into new insights.  The more QDI’s consults understand your business, the more they will know the issues that impact your ability to adopt new strategies, and the more than can move to supporting your decision process. 

Discovery Research

Discovery Research immerses our consultants in your industry and engages the market and your team in an on-going, open learning process. We start with what you know. We mine your internal data, interview players throughout your organization and study research you’ve conducted in the past. The next step is to explore what you don’t know. For this we go to the market. We talk with:

• Customers … yours, the competitors and potential customers
• Your channels, the competitor’s channels and potential channels
• Industry experts
• Associations and government sources to build data on the size of the opportunity

QDI’s Discovery Research paints a clear picture of your markets. It’s based on factual knowledge, market input and our expertise, and has been fine-tuned over more than 20 years of consulting. To develop the in-depth market understanding that leads to actionable marketing plans, we have to learn how the market talks, how the market makes decisions and where specific product classes, vendors or customers fit within the market’s business priorities. No one can write a questionnaire that will provide this information. Instead, we have to start with what we know and modify our questions, often on a daily basis, and even during individual interviews, to learn what we don’t know.

Our research approach is based on the Grounded Theory research concept. Grounded Theory is a qualitative, interpretive, discovery-oriented research method similar to ethnography, which is designed to facilitate theory construction from field data. In our work, the theory we are trying to construct focuses on how the market behaves and how our client’s actions can alter market behavior. What distinguishes Grounded Theory from other research is that it’s constantly evolving. It moves from the general to the specific and doesn’t set out to test a hypothesis.

Although many qualitative methods can be used in Grounded Theory, we rely primarily on unstructured in-depth interviews and secondarily on document analysis and observation. During interviews we collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Constant comparison is the heart of the process. At first we compare what we are learning from different sources, such as one interview to another interview (or other data source). Theory emerges quickly and then we begin to compare data to theory. Patterns appear either as links between categories or as insights about a core category. These patterns form the foundation for potential segmentation strategies based on how customers behave and how they value different offerings.

Next: QDI’s Value Management Tools