USA Market Entry Strategy

Growing market share in mature markets, with little product differentiation is never going to be easy.  In this case it was even more challenging.  Our client, a company within a multi-billion € European group is one of the leading European own-label manufactures in a low value, high-volume consumer-disposable product industry.  Its market share in Europe is one of the highest and seeking further growth it had expanded internationally but had no presence in the USA despite it being the largest market for its products anywhere in World.   The US market was dominated by a near oligopoly, with negative growth, and minimal product differentiation.  The challenge for Ignetica was to develop a market entry to overcome these obstacles.

Ignetica began by analysing our clients business to gain a real understanding of its strengths and weaknesses, its capabilities and cost base.  Gaining an insight into the US market its structure and operation, competitors and consumer preferences was the next big challenge, before attempting to bring these together.  Although there was a clear price differential between the US and Europe providing the profit motive for entry there was little else to providing a compelling proposition.  A head on entry strategy (particularly in a own-label business) would be expensive and could be easily defended by the incumbents, the challenge therefore was to find a niche entry point.

Using precision marketing techniques Ignetica were able to identify a niche segment where our client was able to provide more significant differentiation.  Furthermore, by narrowing the focus our client would be able to target, communicate and build relationships much more effectively and with much smaller budgetary implications.

Based on this niche, ignetica were then able to build a comprehensive, highly targeted entry strategy, through to the production of detailed marketing, sales and operations plans for this market.