MCAD Awareness in the UK

From the November 2002 issue of

Gaining market share involves raising awareness of your products; a tough prospect in a mature CAD market. The likelihood is that most users are simply not very interested in alternative CAD systems, unless they encounter them in the supply chain. CAD Spaghetti looked at the MCAD market to gauge basic levels of awareness of the type of vendors and products that feature regularly in the CAD related media. Using a representative sample of 252 companies from the UK mechanical engineering sector, we asked the managers of CAD related functions at each one a simple question about ten CAD/CAM solution vendors and their products - "have you ever heard of them?"

Developing Familiarity

The relationship between awareness of an actual company and the success of its products is not clear cut. We read out a list of ten MCAD vendors and asked our sample of managers which companies they had heard of. There are no great surprises; awareness of Autodesk is some way ahead of the rest, while the fact that SolidWorks produces CAD tools of the same name must partly explain its position.

SolidWorks and Autodesk aside, awareness of the other CAD vendors is generally low. This might not be a great surprise for a company such as think3 who have not really established a presence yet in the UK; but what of SolidWorks' parent company Dassault Systemes, or PLM giants EDS? Building strong product awareness is of paramount importance to vendors, but there is a danger of 'loose connections' if a vendor's name is not associated with its products. For example, positive quotes or comments in the media either by or about a vendor will lose their impact if they are not readily associated with its products.  

Known Solutions

We then read out a list of CAD/CAM systems and asked our sample of CAD managers which ones they had heard of. Points of interest include the 18 managers we spoke to who said they had never heard of AutoCAD (7% of the sample), and the closeness in the levels of awareness of Pro/ENGINEER, Mechanical Desktop, Solid Edge and SolidWorks.  The fact that Autodesk Inventor has the vendor's title as part of its brand name has probably increased its awareness rating here.

There are of course a number of factors that should be considered before making direct comparisons between these products:

• they are offering different capabilities
• some have a very limited sales presence in the UK
• not all are aimed just at the MCAD market
• some systems are more popular in certain segments of the mechanical engineering sector than others.  

However, all presumably are looking to make some sort of impact in this overall sector, and these figures simply represent the most basic level of awareness among CAD managers.

Conclusion

This survey only addresses the most basic level of corporate and product awareness; more detailed interviews would be needed to reveal whether awareness of such products among potential customers takes the shape of positive, negative or neutral views on the relevance to their business. As the popularity of MCAD packages varies between the different segments of the mechanical engineering sector, so certain vendors will be more interested in findings from a more specific sample of companies.

The mature state of the CAD market will have an impact on product awareness. With so few companies prepared to consider switching to alternative CAD systems, interest in other solutions is likely to be low. Recent entrants to the market are likely to need highly targeted direct marketing action to make any serious impact on the awareness levels of their products.

CAD Spaghetti is a free monthly newsletter published by the Business Advantage Group Plc

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