Market analysis for product software consists of a number of techniques that allow an organization to collect and disseminate information from their external environment of software products for use in determining their market strategy and actions. For example, market analysis helps to determine critical strategies for new software products such as time-to-market length, creating product differentiation, creating and preserving supplier credibility, developing effective distribution channels, forming relationships with large customers, and managing market efforts.
This topic has its roots in marketing discipline. Many types of market research techniques are used to gather this information. Market analysis plays a large part in explaining the current situation of a marketing plan. Marketing is very important to new product development because software products have a short average lifespan of five years and incur 75% of the costs during the research and development phase. Therefore, including market analysis information early on in the product lifecycle can ensure resources are not wasted.
It is a wide field so this article is a sample of scientific work that has linked the fields of marketing and product software. This consists of research in the fields of general market, customer, and competitor analysis which can be seen as processes that are hierarchically grouped under market analysis in the meta-process model from the figure below. There are many processes that can be used for each of these three processes to acquire information from the market. This article only lists a selected few for each.
General Market Characteristics for Product Software
Analysis of general market characteristics should lead to information about the market such as definition, size, trends, and market segmentation. This analysis is needed to help develop and maintain marketing strategies for product software and overall business strategies. The covered methods and techniques to obtain this information are Porter’s five forces model, risk analysis, marketing intelligence, and marketing decision support systems.
Porter’s five forces analysis is useful for software since it highlights many important factors that will be discussed in customer and competitor analysis such as switching costs, brand equity, product differentiation, and price of total purchase.
Customer analysis for product software
Customer analysis is needed to predict behavior and create demand forecasts for product software. It is also necessary in the development of new products to help select the most profitable choice. To analyze customers, aspects such as demographics, buying motivation, and expectations are studied. Besides basing behavior on software only, customers also look at the network externalities from software packages, such as manuals, add-ons, and training courses, to make purchase decisions. All of these subjects are useful for determining target groups (also known as market segments).
Customers can be divided into two groups, consumers (an individual) and corporate buyers. Consumers generally buy software for personal use on their home computer. While they behave as individuals, they are influenced by the environment and the other people around them. For consumers, psychological traits, such as risk-taker versus risk-avoider, play a great role in major decisions by the individual. Many other factors play a role for corporate buyers of product software. Businesses buy product software usually as an indirect material to help them increase the effectiveness of their processes.
Competitor Analysis for Product Software
The final major area of analysis in market analysis is the industry itself. By knowing what is happening with competitors, a software company can adjust strategies to be more successful in the marketplace. Companies should know about market share percentages, strength and weaknesses, industry structure, and strategic groupings among other things to get a good picture of what the competitive environment is like. Strategic groupings can be in the form of alliances between product software firms.
Competitor analysis is especially important when it comes to new product introductions. There are many advantages, especially for revenue, for a software company that can show major enhancement to software or be first to market. This makes competitor analysis particularly important because it can help a firm decide which new product opportunities to pursue by what the market size will be following the actions of other competitors. Knowing what is going around in the software industry is essential for software firms to be successful. Firms need to know which other software products their product must work with (eg operating systems) to provide the most usability for the customer.