business growth strategy consulting services

Market Research Consulting

  • QDI Discovery Research Methodology
  • Competitive and Syndicated Research
  • New Product Research

QDI Strategies’ research services help you ask the right questions and integrate the findings into your decision-making processes. The result is maximum value from your research efforts and maximum market research impact on the decisions made within your organization.

QDI’s core competency is the ability to “capture and translate market understanding into strategy and implementation decisions.” Market understanding comes from open, exploratory conversations with all the market actors – customers, channels, influencers and competitors – that focus on learning about the behavior experience each player has in the market — what they are doing and why they do it. The translation to market insights comes from QDI’s extensive experience in helping clients turn the “whys” into compelling positioning and go-to-market programs that delight our clients’ customers.

Global in Reach

The geography of our work is all the five continents and we have worked on markets from Japan, China, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Middle East, to Africa, 10 countries of Western Europe to Mexico, Brazil & North America.

QDI Discovery Research Methodology

QDI’s methodology is founded on fact-based decision making. As such, the core of our assignments involves Discovery Research. We use a highly qualitative, iterative learning process. We conduct in-depth interviews with the target individuals. The interviews build on each other. We change the questionnaires often, and we always probe to find the questions we should be asking.

Discovery research provides a conversation that enables QDI to learn about the customer’s business, value drivers, and purchase cycle. As we learn things we do not understand, we link back to you, ensuring that what we learn can be applied to your business decisions.

It is not unusual during our discovery research to come back to our clients with different segmentations than originally expected – enabling better targeting of products, services, and channels. This methodology ensures we focus on supporting your strategic decisions, adjusting the discussion guide and focus as necessary.

The interviews build on each other. We change the questionnaires often and we always probe to find the questions we should be asking. This process ensures we have both consistent quantitative data and the deeper qualitative findings learned during the process. Discovery research provides a conversation that enables QDI to learn about the customer’s business and purchase cycle. As we learn things we do not understand, we link back to you, ensuring that what we learn can be applied to your business.

QDI uses this methodology with customers, channels, influencers and competitors to ensure that we focus on supporting your strategic decisions by adjusting the discussion guides, analysis, and reporting as necessary.

As the learning progress QDI organizes the data using the appropriate tools such as QDI’s Marketing Effectiveness Model or Porter’s forces model to create clarify from fuzzy customer, channel, and market data.

All of QDI’s consulting assignments are driven by discovery research. To see QDI case studies, click here.

Voice of the Customer

The benefit of our VOC research gives us the ability to have a deeper understanding of the customer’s purchase drivers. We probe beyond one-word answers such as price, quality and availability to really understand the business needs of customers and how situations drive different behavior. For example, during our work in the Hydraulics market we initially heard that availability needed to be between 1 – 3 days. By probing to understand the customers’ businesses better, we learned that there is a sizable segment that will pay a huge premium for 1 day or less, and a much lower price point for 2 – 3 days. This insight led to transactional rather than traditional customer segmentation. The transactional segmentation provided the clarity needed to develop alternative strategies to win these customers.

Voice of the Channel

QDI Strategies uses this same discovery research approach to provide the market insight to help you design and implement effective and efficient channel strategies. We help you determine the appropriate channels, the types of activities and the support necessary for success within those channels. We help you identify:

  • User Success Factors – what the channel must do to succeed with the targeted customers
  • Channel Success Factors – what must be done to assure that the channels will perform as desired
  • Economic Success Factors – what cost and reward system and infrastructure needs to be put in place to design the low-cost channel organization
  • Channel Partners – what are potential partners for all or portions of the channel role(s) created

Competitive and Syndicated Research

Competitor Profiles

We produce detailed corporate profiles using a variety of methods including using much of our in house country data. These are for strategy work as well as acquisitions. We are eclectic in our methods and believe in direct measurement. We find triangulation has proven very risky in this area, namely “average” consumption per car or “average” frequency of visits almost always leads to poor results. Thus, we focus on collecting information directly from competitors and building confidence in this data by using multiple competitor responses that profile each other in a market.

Syndicated Research

We have a long history in syndicated research in lubricants and flow sensing and controls.
These markets are highly fragmented (note there are over 150 brands of lubricants sold in China!) We have existing studies that can instantly give you market insight covering:

  • Market Coverage: market size, products purchased, brands and manufacturers
  • Product Portfolio: products used by application & buyer data
  • Distribution: all distributors, products they handle, brands, volumes and markets.
  • Competitive Intelligence: full profiles of competitors, acquisitions candidates…
  • Buyer Profiles: location and profile the customers by vertical market
  • Market Structure:Intelligence about inter-relationships and cross brand

The combination of our existing application databases and industrial knowledge put us in a very advantageous position to serve clients in these industries and today we have over 25 lubricant clients alone.

The geography of our work is all the five continents and we have worked on markets from Japan, China, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Middle East, to Africa, 10 countries of Western Europe to Mexico, Brazil & North America.

New Product Research

QDI Strategies helps your organization make effective product development decisions. Our research looks for opportunities based on either customer needs or your technical capabilities. We review our research findings to determine if there is a market ready and capable of adopting your potential offerings. We then use the appropriate research vehicle as part of the discovery research process, or as part of a more structured process of quantifying opportunities.

  • One-on-One Focus Groups – an in-depth research process that explores the industrial buyer’s or individual consumer’s behavior, thoughts and feelings as they relate to a product or service offering.
  • Innovative Focus Groups – the use of computer technology enables us to combine qualitative research and QFD (Quality Function Deployment) voice of customer methodologies with creative brainstorming techniques to help you create breakthrough product concepts and positioning strategies.
  • Conjoint Analysis Research Techniques – plus other quantitative research methodologies are used to validate consumer responses and perceptions.

Research to Spur Innovation

Customers don’t know what they need, but using insight to understand and continuously blend customer needs with your capabilities* will allow you generate new innovations. QDI has spent the last twenty years working with companies to help them understand customer needs and turn them into product and marketing innovations. In QDI’s presentation, “Research to Spur Innovation” QDI shares it experience and explores the six requirements to conducting a successful Voice of the Market Discovery process.

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“In my experience, what distinguishes QDI is that they identify the deep underlying insights quickly. Their research techniques draw the relevant truths out of the marketplace and these enable us to develop valid strategies that will make a difference. Our company’s true opportunities in the current marketplace become apparent. The interactive process gets buy-in from the participants within our company so at the end of the project, we have actionable strategies.”
Michael Hadjinian, TPI Composites

“QDI’s work is superior to anything their competitors have provided. QDI quantified the opportunity and gave us a better look at when customers will purchase than any other consulting work we’ve had in the past.”
Doug Petterson, Caterpillar