Case Study / Research & Messaging
| Client | Gradwell | www.gradwell.com |
|---|---|
| Objective | Develop a deep understanding of the target market and an appropriate messaging structure for that market |
| Quick Facts |
|
Gradwell is an internet services company, providing internet telephony, hosting, broadband and email services to small and micro businesses in the UK. Established by Peter Gradwell in his second year at university, the company has achieved year-on-year organic growth for the last 10 years.
Growth in this period was mainly through word of mouth, amongst the technical community, and is largely predicated on Peter's personal reputation for technical excellence. Gradwell has a loyal following amongst a highly technical literate audience, but are significantly under represented amongst those businesses who are less naturally technically minded. To continue growing the business, Gradwell needed to appeal to a new audience, but maintain the trust of the existing one.
Clear Thought was briefed to work with Gradwell to gain a deeper understanding of the different audiences, to capture the company's brand values and to establish a messaging matrix.
The programme:
A research programme was undertaken over a six week period, which included:
- An extensive customer survey with 10% of Gradwell's customer base
- In-depth interviews with a smaller representative sample of Gradwell's customers
- In-depth interviews with appropriate prospect organisations
- Short survey amongst the wider business community
- Desk research into business buying behaviour
- An internal survey as to values and culture
- A series of internal workshops and depth interviews
Key findings:
The research allowed us to split the audience into three core groups, based on their attitude to technology:
- Tech Enthusiast: people for whom technology is a hobby, highly technically literate and actively enjoy using technical jargon.
- Tech Competent: people who broadly understand technology and like to make the best use of it for their business, but who do not have a personal interest.
- Tech Averse: people for whom technology is a necessary evil, and for whom technical jargon is somewhat daunting.
Gradwell's existing audience was overwhelmingly Tech Enthusiast, and their highest growth opportunity was from amongst the Tech Averse. An immediate thought therefore, might have been to amend messaging to suit this latter audience. However, in understanding buyer behaviour more closely, it was clear that Tech Averse buyers tend to seek the advice of friends or colleagues in the other two groups. As such, it was extremely important that messaging worked on a number of levels, maintaining the trust and loyalty of the vital reference group, whilst not alienating the rest of the business population.
From the messaging project, we developed:
- A messaging matrix with common and unique messages for each audience.
- A clear brand map, capturing the values and culture of Gradwell.
- Indications as to areas of improvement to feed into an ongoing product and support improvement programme.
Some added value:
In the process, we also identified over 100 customers willing to be published case studies for Gradwell and a number of leads for cross-sell and up-sell of newer products.
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