Many b2b organisations offer a complex combination of products and associated technical and consultancy services – often without paying attention to how these offerings are combined into a coherent ‘bundle’ or ‘value proposition.’ The bundling of individual products or services into a wider package is therefore becoming increasingly common.

 

Getting clear

Regardless of industry vertical, there are considerable advantages to product design research, which involves looking into how your organisation’s offer can be more clearly and profitably presented to the marketplace.

A pre-requisite for any product bundling / offer remodelling exercise is getting a clear handle on what your customers or potential customers are willing to pay a premium for. For instance, many product-led business to business companies are seeing considerable opportunities for offering complementary services alongside their traditional offer.

However, although the opportunity is recognised in principle by these companies, hard figures about the value that is placed on these new offers by the market may be lacking.

There are several ways in which product design research can help to evaluate and quantify this value:

  • Discrete choice modelling – for instance, through conjoint exercises, regression, and other advanced statistical techniques
  • SIMALTO
  • Constant sum scoring (or points-spend) exercises
  • More qualitative, immersive research with customers to record and observe how products and services are used by organisations

To read our white paper on product development, follow the link below:

Using Market Research For Product Development

Formulating bundles and offers that correspond to segments

Armed with knowledge about what the market needs and is willing to pay for, we can use product design research to begin to formulate potential value propositions. In any product bundling research, it is critical that the packages that are offered reflect the varied needs of different customer types. In this respect, there needs to be recognition of the relationship between offers and market segmentation.

Depending on your organisation’s strategy, the following factors may also be important:

  • Ensuring that bundles succeed in maximising a company’s profit, revenue or market share
  • Evaluating the ease of marketing or bringing specific offers to the market based, for instance, on your organisation’s capability to deliver a given proposition
  • Identifying how your company’s operational, customer-facing and back-office processes may need to adapt to serve the new propositions
  • Ensuring the packages are consistent with your organisation’s current (or intended) brand positioning

Given the above, determining the final form of packages or bundles is typically a blend of art and science: Statistics may be able to tell us what is theoretically likely to succeed, but the sound judgement of an experienced B2B researcher will ensure that this is also the case in practice.

Work with us

As a specialist business to business research consultancy, B2B International is well-versed in researching product bundling. We recognise that the specifics of your marketplace need to be reflected in the research design and that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach.