Cascade Strategies has conducted many market research studies through the years for Keysight Technologies.  These studies resulted in a major discovery about how Keysight is being perceived differently by the “broad” and “narrow” markets for test and measurement equipment.

To elaborate, Keysight‘s “broad” market is composed of people who use lower-cost and/or mobile field equipment such as handheld test and measurement instruments, clamp meters, modular instrumentation, etc.  This market might or might not be using high-performance bench equipment.

On the other hand, the “narrow” market incorporates people who use advanced and feature-rich T&M equipment only, such as benchtop BERTs, digitizers, signal analyzers and generators, oscilloscopes, test automation software, wireless communications test sets, one box testers, and others.  They tend to make more sophisticated measurements in higher operating ranges with typically benchtop equipment and thus don’t use lower-end or field equipment.  This is Keysight’s more traditional target audience.

Compounding this situation is Keysight‘s challenges in the “awareness” war.  While Keysight isn’t losing the war to the typical set of large players like Tek, R&S, NI, etc., we found that their market space is slowly being taken over by a gaggle of smaller players who are increasing both awareness and preference by small fractions.  This didn’t happen overnight, but it is an empirical, measurable phenomenon that’s been taking place for a few years.  Cascade Strategies made recommendations to Keysight management on how to close this gap.