Strategic Dataworks is a company with a historic brand and products that help manage, control and direct the shipping channels of the world. Anderson Baillie Business Growth was engaged to reposition a product as a significantly different new version of an existing product.

Anderson Baillie presented an approach of product evaluation to drive differentiation and upgrade opportunities. A series of workshops were then introduced, starting with an assessment of the current proposition and business goals to determine how revenues were traditionally sought and how they would differ for the new product. Further workshops then dissected the new product to build a picture of the feature set and develop a roadmap that would allow the product to sell in the future.

A step too far

The aspirations of Strategic Dataworks had been to develop a selling message which would drive interest in their new product. We advised that this was a step too far and that selling new against existing would be difficult as it could cause an opening for their competitors, instead they had to admit there were limitations with the existing product and use these to justify the new product. Once the limitations were realised, Anderson Baillie proposed that the sell should be based on the product's roadmap as an investment strategy.

Creating the product roadmap

To help develop the road map, Anderson Baillie focused on product management. The product's features and values were assessed against groups of direct, indirect and substitute competitors, including apathy. A matrix to counter competitor arguments was documented and working with the product development team was honed into a product vision statement. This information was extracted and packaged as an investor statement - the investor being the customer.

The positioning created through this process and the encapsulated value was moved to an illustrative level through modelling and design to enable its use in marketing and selling circumstances.

Overall Anderson Baillie Business Growth helped a new product gain a new strategy, new roadmap and new way of marketing and selling while protecting existing to maintain existing revenue streams.