Finding focus: What does industry want?

Tailoring proposition and messaging

The REWIRE Innovation & Knowledge Centre (IKC) team had a long list of things they could be doing to support their goals, but they weren’t sure which of them their partners would value most. They  wanted to attract investment from industry, but didn’t know how to tailor their offer to appeal to their potential partners, or what language they should use in their marketing and comms.

The team risked doing too much of the things that weren’t important to their partners, and basing their messaging around the things that didn’t matter.

Our approach

Alongside detailed analysis of competitors, we carried out nine in-depth interviews with a cross-section of REWIRE’s existing industry partners, from small specialists to established multinational companies.

What we heard was clear: industry partners were looking for early insight into the problems that they’d be facing in five years’ time. They wanted help solving them, but that help had to be the right shape: flexible, responsive, and collaborative.

From here, we could help REWIRE sharpen their proposition and shape their messaging. We partnered with a marketing strategy expert who translated this into an achievable marketing strategy rooted in what their partners really wanted.

Finally, we ran a workshop with the academic partners, sharing the findings, gathering their ambitions for the programme and orienting them towards the actions that they could start to take immediately to meet those goals.

Impact

The results gave the REWIRE team clarity and confidence:

• A sharper proposition grounded in real industry needs

• Authentic, clear messaging: what they do and why it matters

• A marketing strategy with a clear focus, avoiding the risk of “doing too much”

• Energised, on-board academic partners

What they said

“Working with Kat and Ben has given us valuable insight into what the need and market gap is and how best we might be able to pitch it and build our offering.” – Aby Sankaran, Centre Manager

“There is so much for us to think about. The work has provided excellent supporting evidence for some of the changes I want to make to how we talk about our offerings.” – Katie Hore, Innovation Director