Profiling

We profile multiple factors and find ways to keep you on top in your pursuit

To successfully wade through obstacles, you must first analyse the path that you are about to tread, and prepare for all possible consequences.

After aligning on the purpose, the logical next step is to analyse factors that can impact your pursuit of your purpose. Profiling is important insofar as letting you scrutinise all possibilities and giving you a heads up on forthcoming situations. There are many factors which can affect your pursuit. The foremost of these is the environment in which you are working, and the markets you plan to serve. Next you need to study the competition or peers who are already invested in the same activity. Then you have to undertake the most important task of all: the audience study. When you are done with these three analyses, you will get a fair idea of your speciality, and you may enumerate your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) and also the necessary call to action for each audience segment.

Market research

As an organisation, you cannot afford to operate out of silos. Even when all aspects of your purpose are aligned, there may still be external factors which can affect your organisation’s performance – political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors. We scrutinise every sub-factor under each of these, for positive and negative effects. The positive effects may be leveraged to your advantage later; simultaneously, we may find ways to firewall or subvert the negative effects.

Competition Analysis

In this exercise, we list out all possible competitors, irrespective of the size of their organisations. Then, arranging them in increasing order of importance, we analyze the top three-to-five competitors and see how you fare against them. We conduct the SWOT analysis, comparing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strengths and weaknesses become reasons to analyse internal factors, while opportunities and threats are of an external nature. Our strategy utilizes our strengths to capture opportunities. Our tactic further involves being conscious of weaknesses and trumping the threats as necessary.

Audience Selection

The study of audience groups follows a separate dynamic altogether. Again, it involves listing all possible audience groups. Then we proceed to understand their knowledge of our line of work. We also try to characterise their demographics e.g. age, education, gender, vocation, etc. We then study their interest or ability to invest in our work. We also prefer to know about the environment of the target group; their attitude towards the market; and their considerable cultural differences. We next look to understand their personal needs, and see how we can customise your offering or message to meet the need-gap. We also list their potential expectations and leverage this information towards further exercises.

Recognising Your USP and Call to Action’

Once we have a handle on the market situation, competition and the audience, we can then deduce your Unique Selling Proposition and Call to Action. We arrive at these through the formula that market positives (M) combined with competition strategy (CS) gives us the USP – i.e., M+ X CS = USP. Similarly, the Call to Action (CtA) is derived from the USP by factoring in the audience’s expectations, Thus, USP x A(e) = CtA.