Choosing which turf care jobs to automate next

Automation could take on many of the jobs in professional turf care, so the question was which to take on first. For an outdoor equipment maker, we sized the opportunity job by job and tested propositions with turf professionals.

Client: Outdoor equipment maker
Industry: Outdoor equipment
Markets: Eight countries
Kind of work: Innovation and concept development
Our role: Market sizing and proposition testing for automating professional turf care

The question

A turf professional’s week is made up of many jobs, and automation could take on more than one of them.

The maker’s leadership wanted to know which jobs to automate, how they might fit together, how large the prize was in money and what should come first. It also needed to know what a proposition would have to promise before a turf professional believed it.

Our approach

We rebuilt the market from the ground up, site by site and task by task, so every job could be sized on the same terms.

Scenario propositions, each automating a different part of the work, were shaped with consultants and turf professionals into ideas people could react to. A survey of turf professionals then measured stated purchase intent for each one.

Stated intent tends to run ahead of real buying, so we adjusted it for overclaim before it touched the sizing. The adjusted figures are estimates under the conditions tested, never a measure of what customers will buy.