Acme Consulting

Acme Consulting is a consulting company specializing in the marketing of high-technology products in international markets. Its expertise is the marketing of personal computers and market research, all in international markets.

Situation Analysis

Acme Consulting offers high-level expertise in international business development, channel development, distribution strategies, and marketing of high-tech products. The company aim to take on consulting work in related markets, specifically the rest of cities or countries and will also look for additional leverage by taking brokerage positions and representation positions to create percentage holdings in product results.

Market Overview

Acme focuses on high technology manufactures of computer hardware and software, services and networking who want to sell into markets in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. These are mostly larger companies and occasionally medium-sized companies.

Our most important customers are executives in larger corporations. They do not want to waste their time or risk their money looking for bargain information or questionable expertise. As they go into markets looking at new opportunities, they are very sensitive to risk their company’s name & reputation.

Competitive Situation

The key element in purchase decisions made at the Acme client level is trust in the professional reputation and reliability of the consulting firm.

The competition comes in several forms:

• The most significant competition is no consulting at all, companies choosing to do business development, channel development, and market research in-house. Their own managers do this on their own, as part of their regular business functions. Our key advantages in competition with in-house development are that managers are already overloaded with responsibilities; they don’t have time for additional responsibilities in new market development or new channel development. Also, Acme can approach alliances, vendors, and channels on a confidential basis, gathering information and making initial contacts in ways that the corporate managers can’t.
• The high-level prestige management consulting: (names omitted to protect confidentiality), etc. These are essentiality generalists who take their third name brand management consulting into specialty areas. Their other very important weakness is the management structure that has the partners selling new jobs, and inexperienced associates delivering the work. We compete against them as experts in our specific fields, and with the guarantee that our clients will have the top-level people doing the actual work.
• The third general kind of competitor is the international market research company: (names omitted to protect confidentiality), etc. These companies are formidable competitors for published market research and market forums but cannot provide the kind of high-level consulting that Acme will provide.
• Sales representation, brokering and deal catalysts are an ad-hoc business form that will be defined in detail by the specific nature of each individual case.

Macro Environment

New technology has become the driving force of our market. The Internet is changing high-tech marketing overnight. While the manufacturers used to deal with distributors in smaller national markets. Nowadays the distributors are terribly concerned about our pricing and marketing over the Internet.

On the hand, the manufacturers need loyal local allies, good distribution, and value added. On the other hand, they can’t pretend to offer protected markets.

SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis covers strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. Strengths & weakness are generally internal attributes which we can address by changing our business. Opportunities & threats are generally external.

Overall the mix is exciting. We live in an age of growth, change, and business revolution. The internet offers us opportunities and threats. We need to make our dealing with it one of our biggest strengths, to minimize our weakness.

Strengths

• True Expertise: All of our principals know this area very well. Our experience and expertise are better than anybody we know of in this area particular niche area.
• Dominance of communications technologies from a users’ point of view: We have an excellent website, secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) facilities with password protection for sending and receiving documents from clients, major bandwidth, and an automatic link to training allies to help clients to come up to speed with the facilities we offer. We can even hold internet meetings with shared interface and visuals.
• Manageable Size: We don’t have to support a large overhead and our clients know that we deliver what we promise ourselves. Our competition, the larger consulting houses tend to build on the structure of the major partners doing the selling and younger associates, with far less experience actually delivering the consulting.
• Contacts: Years of industry experience means a lot of word of mouth marketing, contacts, and networking.

Weakness

• Marketing: As a group, we are good at the direct sales involved in making a close, but we don’t have the resources required to do much general marketing. We will depend on word of mouth first as our main form of generating leads.
• Staff: Without the overhead of staff, we can’t leverage on people to develop documents and presentations, research in detail, and fill in the blanks. We are short on support for telephones, fax, email etc.

Opportunities

• Internet Growth: Companies are being dragged into worldwide marketing, like it or not. Growth rates are very high, opportunities are obvious.
• International Market Growth: Europe and Latin America are booming. Asia has suffered a bit but is recovering. Manufacturers are anxious to take their new technologies across borders.
• Growing red tape (Government) involved with hiring full-time employees, especially internationally, especially at the executive level.

Threats

• The internet is a threat as well as an opportunity: Our expertise is about crossing borders, managing multiple markets, and the problems we solve are being reduced in importance by the growing availability of information. For example, software companies used to charge huge premiums for software available in the different smaller markets, but their potential customers are now much more likely to see available prices elsewhere and buy over the net.
• The larger, branded competition is recognizing our niche: They are beginning to complete in our area, recognize our niche. We are no longer alone.
• New competitors are developing in new markets: Particularly as the European market grows, competitors developing in that area become more significant.

Marketing Strategy

The strategy is the focus. Our strategy involves focusing on a specific area of expertise in which we are an as strong group as in any company anywhere in the world. We are true experts in the introduction of new technology products, especially through channels of distribution. Acme will focus on three geographical markets; the US, Europe and Latin America, and in limited product segments; personal computers, software, networks, telecommunications, personal organizers and technology integration products.

Objectives

• We need to establish ourselves as experts: This means being quoted in the major trade press, speaking at industry events, and gaining recognition. Our measurable and specific objective is to be introduced in three major as established experts in the field of the international market entry.
• We need brand-name reference clients: By the end of this year, we need three major brand names we can cite as clients. We need to be able to reference by name and contact phone number.
• We need at least one client in each of the three main regions: the US and Europe for sure, and also either Latin America or Asia. We can’t be whom we claim to be without being truly multi-continental.

STP Strategies

• Marketing Segmentation: Acme segment or break down their market on the basis of geographic. Acme focuses on the US, Europe, and Latin America or Asia.
• Market Targeting: Acme Consulting focuses on a few thousand well-chosen potential customers in the US, Europe, and Latin America. These few thousand high-tech manufacturing companies are the key customers for Acme.
• Market Positioning: For high-technology who are looking to enter new international markets, Acme Consulting offers a unique team of experienced managers with proven expertise, on a temporary contract basis. Acme Consulting is a temporary variable cost. Unlike most management consultants, Acme consulting is specialized on a very focused expertise that is hard to duplicate.

Marketing Mix

Ours is a delivery-intensive, word-of-mouth, repeat-business business. We aren’t marketing as much as selling direct. Obviously, we know we need to understand our marketing process which is why the attention to quotes in magazines, speaking engagements, etc. but we are really selling more than marketing. In this section, we will focus on the components of our marketing mix.

Products/Services Offered

The product itself is a key component to our marketing mix. Our product/service should be our best advertisement. We need to fulfill the promise we make: we take a product across national boundaries into new markets, explore channels, guide our client through the maze, and establish the relationships the client needs. This is a very focused deliverable. We aren’t just doing international marketing or marketing consulting; we are getting products into channels. The service itself is a key to our market.

Price

We need to make sure that our services are adequately priced. Our positioning, as well as our finances, demands high pricing. Ultimately, our client will end up spending less on us than on the branded major consultants, because they will wrap the consulting around a lot of additional research and their standard packaging that doubles or triples the cost. We will focus in on the exact target and charge more per day and less for the total job.

Promotion

For promotion, we follow the mainstream thinking about high end consulting. There are 3 main components of promotion:

1. Getting recognized & quoted as experts: Our public relation expense is intended to position us as the experts the business press calls on for information on international channel marketing. We need to quote in Business Week, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as Wired, Red Herring, Upside, and the like.
2. Word of mouth and reference sites: This goes back to our core value, the importance of fulfilling the promise.
3. The Internet: We need to dominate the internet, search terms, placement in searches, etc.

Place

Placement or distribution is a very important part of the product mix definition.