Tariff Strategy: Focus on the Relationships that Matter Most
As tariff volatility grows, companies with deep customer, supplier, and government relationships are better positioned to adapt. These long-term ties are now strategic assets.
Market Segmentation
Understand how the market breaks down and whom you should focus on to win in the future. The right segment to go after isn’t always the most profitable right now or the biggest, but it’s the one that is right for your objectives.
- Understand which questions will give you the most effective breakdown
- Learn not just how the market breaks down demographically, but also psychographically so you can really resonate with a segment
- Identify segments that are going to drive the future of the business
- Bring the segments to life with personas that people can actually use on a daily basis to make decisions
Market Analysis
The key to understanding a new market is to assess everything from growth potential to competitors to how it fits your business.
- Understand potential growth with rigorous TAM analysis
- Hone in on differentiation by exploring competitors
- Identify how you can best take advantage of your right to win
Opportunity Definition
Oftentimes, opportunities can be so abstract that it’s impossible to use them to make any decisions. Get specific about what the opportunities are so you can prioritize which ones are right to grow your business.
- Align on the rationale for what makes a great opportunity for your company
- Ground opportunities by understanding their value with market assessments, leading indicators, and analogs
- Learn what makes an opportunity attractive to an industry or group
- Bring opportunities to life with illustrative ideas and use cases so your company can decide if this is something they actually want
- Prioritize opportunities that will help you win in the future
- Understand the capabilities required to bring opportunities to life
Opportunity Mapping
Sometimes you have a specific space you want to explore. Other times, you don’t even know the options. You need a landscape. Explore all potential opportunities based on needs, not solutions, and prioritize the right ones for your business.
- Explore a landscape of all of the different opportunities that a company could pursue in your space
- Understand the underlying needs that drive opportunities and make up the landscape
- Prioritize based on what makes sense for you specifically vs somebody else
- Bring opportunities to life with illustrative ideas
- Get clarity on what you’re going to do and, more importantly, what you’re not going to do based on the prioritized opportunities
- Align on a trajectory for how to get from where you are now to the future
We have had excellent collaborations with Jump. Their total systems thinking approach which leverages deep, insightful social science and agile business model creativity provides a “hybrid” style rare in the innovation field.
Ralph Jerome Chief Innovation Officer
Mars
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