Category Understanding
When insight into product’s competitive environment is needed, category understanding is the right answer.
Category understanding serves as a first step into the examination of a product category, as it defines your competitive environment for a certain product. It can be used as stand-alone research or combined with later-on explorative market studies for branding, positioning and segmentation, and category management purposes.
With new off-category oriented products entering markets, categories are no longer clearly defined. For example, products such as yoghurt that improves your immune system or a carbonated drink that helps your digestion are being introduced.
Such products do not fit into the existing structures and are crossing categories, rearranging them or even forming new ones. Questions such as ‘What actually is my category?’ or ‘Which products are my competitors?’ become increasingly relevant.
Our approach
Valicon Category Understanding takes product-scaping beyond traditional categories that are defined on the level of attributes. Through a segmentation of products, it provides insight into the market structure, examining your product’s close and broad competition. A category is mapped by way of defining the main players in a category as well as subcategories, important category attributes, benefits and need state use occasions.
This approach is used when little or no information about a category or/and target product is available, such as:
- launching of new products in a category,
- emergence of new categories,
- entering new markets,
- repositioning of existing products and
- all other purposes where category structure is not clearly understood.
Through this approach, Valicon helps clients decipher market structures and provides crucial insight for successful strategic marketing planning.