Gateway

Problem:
Gateway had lost tremendous market share to Dell and other competitors in the PC market. In the process, it had experienced continual management turnover and had lost its sense of understanding about who its customers were, who the company made money from serving and how to reach customers profitably.

Core Strategies Assignment:
Rebuild Gateway's ability to understand its customers by creating a customer and competitive intelligence function for both its consumer and business divisions.

Solution:
Core Strategies became contract executives at Gateway and created a very innovating, 9-person team that gathered intelligence on customers and competitors in a comprehensive manner. Our team created an automated competitive pricing and promotion engine that provided updates on a daily basis. It introduced a web-based market research panel that allowed the company to screen new product and promotion concepts very inexpensively and very quickly. The team did an extensive analysis of Gateway's customer data base to identify the profile of who bought both computer and consumer electronics products from the company, in the process identifying which customers were profitable and which were not. Finally, the Core Strategies team rebuilt relationships with key Gartner and IDC analysts that had been neglected over the years.

Results:
The Company adopted a new, targeted approach to acquiring and cultivating customers. This system acquired customers 15 times less expensively that the previous system. The company was able to respond to competitive pricing moves much more quickly than they had; resulting in significant wins in institutional markets. Finally, the company generated positive analyst coverage for the first time in many years.