Case Study: New Product Assessment and White Paper

One of the industry's largest print solution vendors contracted Madison Advisors to assess its newly released line of continuous feed devices. Offering one of the print industry's broadest range of services and solutions, the Vendor has over 61,000 employees across its worldwide offices. Its print solutions range from desktop devices to high-speed, cut sheet printers, digital presses, and continuous feed solutions.

Strategic Issues
The Vendor had developed a line of continuous feed printers designed to support both transactional and publishing applications. Prior to the release it wanted an objective assessment of the strengths, challenges, and ideal markets for the devices. It wanted a competitive comparison of how the print line compared to competing offerings in both the transaction and publishing markets. It needed a third-party white paper from an industry-respected source that validated the print line's ability to fulfill requirements for both types of applications. Most importantly, the Vendor wanted to validate the print line's role in the convergence of the transactional and publishing markets.

Solution
Madison Advisors conducted an assessment of the new printers in which we compared them to the leading print solutions in both the transactional and publishing markets. We provided the Vendor with objective insight into which of the printers' competitive strengths should be promoted, as well as areas of challenge that required further development in order to compete with existing competitive solutions. Based on our expertise in the enterprise output industry, we identified key markets where the solution was likely to have the greatest impact upon its initial release.

To help the Vendor promote its new line of continuous feed printers, we then developed a white paper that identified the applications for which the print line was best suited based on its strengths. The paper provided an innovative introduction to the convergence of the transaction and publishing markets and the benefits of a common solution. It included detail on how the continuous feed print line would help organizations see higher quality and greater efficiencies with a single device for both types of applications.