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Whether to Weather a New Business Setting

The U.S. television and media sector is the world’s largest and most competitive single country TV broadcast market. Understanding this backdrop and the stakes, an international client approached Big Village hoping to decide whether to enter this market. This company already has the technology with plans to make weather presentations more realistic and impactful. Before entering the U.S. ecosystem, though, this client came to Big Village for help answering a few questions: What does the marketplace look like? How important — or not — are visualization technologies to broadcasters? How does the market work? Finally, how are suppliers selected?

For an added, exciting research challenge, this client’s plans extend even beyond the massive American landscape. Their designs include growth in UK markets and similar business environments.

What We Did:

For the first phase of this research, Big Village and our client agreed Big Village’s expert team would recruit Weather Unit leaders — five in the U.S., three in the UK — for in-depth discussions. These thinkers must be responsible for business planning and unit management. Primary targets included decisionmakers at large broadcast companies. These recruits would be interviewed to provide insight on market size, growth, trends, and opportunities. During the recruitment phase, Big Village conducted secondary research, where our offerings include a variety of industry sources: specialty business data, trades, newspapers, publications, databases, and directories. The Big Village Accelerated Intelligence team integrates human insight and authoritative content with technology to deliver insightful business decision support.

We worked with two central screening criteria. One, the candidate must be part of the Weather Unit’s management team at their organization. Two, the expert must be involved in business planning, budget setting and management, or weather presentation technology supplier decisions.

The Result:

Big Village’s diligence and hard work was successful, and our research was well-received by our client. Most importantly, we determined there is a market for them! Our client elected to move forward with Phase 2 — where Big Village will recruit 29 weather presenters, spread, as before, between the U.S. and the UK. These experts will be using the weather technology directly, giving our client an in-depth look at what their technology means to a critical population and how it will be applied in real business decisions.