Marketing plan for the introduction of a new high-end detection tool

Abstract

The folowing master thesis focuses on the development of the marketing plan for a new high-end radar based detection tool. It was written in colaboration with Hilti Corp., one of the leading manufacturers of detection systems in the worldwide building construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to define the marketing mix (product, price, placement, and promotion) in order to present the market-entry strategy and eventualy become the most important player in the detection segment. With the introduction of this new tool, Hilti completes its detection portfolio and aims to fulfil al customer application needs pertaining to hit prevention and concrete structural analysis. Since al existing products on the market that employ GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) technology require a high level of expertise, special focus was assigned to the definition of the product in order to reduce the complexity to a large extent. This alows for non-specialists to operate the tool in common applications. The obtained results are to introduce a tool that is easy to use, simple to set up, and alows for straightforward interpretation, while simultaneously provides high reliability and robustness for jobsite applications. The marketing plan does not only focus on one customer segment but also demonstrates approaches as to how to reach the mainstream construction customers by offering two differentiated product concepts, pricing, and placement strategies. In order to create a significant impact in the market, al these factors are reinforced by a promotion campaign to create awareness within the company as wel as in the target customer segments. The development of the marketing strategy has been carried out through a two- phase process. The first phase included an analysis of the market, as wel as how Hilti provided product solutions to specific customer segments. The second phase of this process included a more detailed evaluation of some market players as wel as a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. Both phases resulted in the actual definition of the product concept and the marketing plan, in order to most successfuly sel the product. In summary, considering that Hilti is a customer oriented company, the main benefits for its customers in comparison to the existing products are saving time and money by reducing hit risk when opening a concrete wal and increasing the performance productivity by decreasing the downtime and increasing the scanning efficiency.