Product Management

The Background

Company X is a leading manufacturer in the secured card industry. Company X is technologically lead and one of the 4 largest companies on their markets, with global exports and established representations in Asia and the US. They have a consolidated turnover about Euro 50 Million and a head count of about 200 people.

The Opportunity

Headed by their President, company X decided to explore the opportunities laying in the photo area. Even with the sectorial on-going reorganisation, the photo industry represents a market about 10x the size of the secured card, a juicy opportunity for a company like company X. Moreover, a change in consumer attitude and the rapid growth of digital pictures were analysed as positive circumstances by Company X.

The Challenge

Although Company X thoroughly masters the basic technology at the core of its products, company X does not know what changes will have to be done to its range to adapt to the photo field.

With a very different route to market, company X must develop a new set of marketing approach and tools dedicated to the new opportunity.

Company X has a very limited knowledge of the photo industry and no experienced manager available to build-up the business case and strategy to develop in that field.

Varega

Company X and Varega cooperated together in several phases:

In a first phase, Varega realised and submitted to Company X an industry technological report, a global market estimate, and recommendations for entry strategy ; Further to Varega’s positive input in Phase 1, it was not surprising that we were invited to bid and then selected for the development and implementation of Phase 2.

In the second Phase of the project, Company X decided to pursue the evaluation by a Field Test followed by a Pilot; the Field Test was run at 4 locations, all photo retailers in the UK, where Company X’s equipment was installed. After that field test, a pilot project was run, installing 30 photo outlets with Company X’s equipment. Varega covered the complete project, from price positioning to essential technical maintenance, and carried on with a continuous marketing effort to constantly stimulate interest and input from participants. Thanks to Varega, Company X could reply month after month on a team that was following the project on a daily basis, and could focus on the results and market feed-back with a minimum of efforts.

The Results

Based on the feed-back, Company X was able to integrate the project to its strategy and marry it with other retailer related opportunities. In a context of economic crisis, Company X was able to evaluate the opportunity on hard facts at a minimum cost and preserving its complete flexibility.