How to manage your brand in a way that engages, acquires, and retains customers at scale, promoting growth and profitability in line with your organizational strategy.

Brand Management can take many forms depending on an Organization’s context, business model, and product portfolio architecture. Brand management spans from high-level strategic definitions through to execution deployment and day-to-day activations. However, from our experience, it is common to face several challenges along this path:

• Effectively assessing right-to-win and how-to-win: Bringing the appropriate strategic depth, market understanding, and financial analysis to brand planning, to set a realistic “size of the prize” and actionable path to help consumers and the organization achieve their goals.
• Delivering and sustaining the right value proposition to the right target audience: Keeping up with changes in consumer preferences and channel trends across categories, brands, and products, and guaranteeing the internal capability to act.
• Connecting brand and product plans to organizational strategy, financials, sales, and operations planning: Ensuring coherence in the brand and value proposition guidance across brands and categories, particularly in Multinational, Multibrand, and Multicategory Organizations, to enable clear guidelines in priorities, investments and commercial strategy for execution.
• Empowering Brand Managers: Recruiting and training Brand Managers with an emphasis on managerial mindset, and proficiency in analytical, creative and people skills. Brand Managers must be owners of the brand P&L, understand its levers, and be able to collaborate with functional specialists to deliver results.
• Giving enough focus to execution and monitoring: Managing resource time to not over-invest in planning but guarantee that share-of-mind is focused on excelling at activation execution, monitoring, and adjustment using routines and feedback to ensure continuous improvement and agility to adapt to market conditions.

We support clients to build feasible and pragmatic plans, led by consumer-centric guidance, advanced analytical skills, and granular planning, aligning interests along the value chain

The mindset behind the construction is using an outside-in approach and reality-based insights to support clients to:

1. Construct robust, consumer-centric Brand Plans aligned with the organization’s goals, which translate to both C-Suite discussions and day-to-day implementation
2. Strengthen Brand Manager capabilities, by structuring tools and analysis that enable your teams to take an equally strategic and practical approach to problems
3. Improve understanding of customer goals and the product value chain, and use this insight to build actionable plans with clear stages, roles and responsibilities, and goals
4. Define the strategic roadmap, and design and implement the governance model to monitor the quality and results of execution

• Know your right to win and how to win: Develop the best solutions for customers and sustain the internal changes to implement them
• Increase market performance and profitability: Increase sales and financial results in all brands across the whole portfolio
• Consumer-oriented mindset: Create consumer-aligned value propositions by identifying the right targets and uncovering their needs
• Business-oriented strategy: Guarantee clarity of levers to pull for greater impact on results (share, revenue, Rev Mgt, product mix, COGS and Cost to Serve)
• Actionable roadmap: Creation of a detailed activity map, with clear impacts and results phasing to deliver and sustain Brand Management over time
• Empowered brand teams: Formation of teams with the correct skillset, templates and governance to tackle both strategical and operational challenges

1. UNDERSTAND & TARGET CUSTOMER DEMANDS
   We start by targeting your ideal customer personas

• We combine existing internal data with tailor-made customer research, interviews, and field visits, to understand your target customers and their needs in depth, considering willingness-to-pay (WTP) and alternatives.

2. DESIGN VALUE PROPOSITION & PRICING
   Creating the best value proposition to your target audience and target price

• No customer intentionally picks the second-best option for herself, considering her needs, on any occasion. Starting from the target customer segment, we work with a cross-functional team from across your organization, together with creative agencies, to develop a positioning that best meets their functional and emotional benefits within the WTP range.

3. ROADMAP TO DELIVER VALUE PROPOSITION
   Here we determine: “What are the implications of our value proposition in terms of developing new or improved products, services, cost structures, and Go-to-Market channels?”

• We develop a roadmap of all projects needed to credibly deliver the proposed value proposition to customers; assessing cost, complexity, and match with your current core capabilities. This is a critical input to assess viability and strategy alignment, but also to prepare the foundation for implementation.

4. CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION STRATEGY
   With a robust and credible value proposition for your target customer segment, it’s time to define how to reach out to them and scale

• To reach the market effectively, we cover three angles:
  • We partner with client marketeers and specialized agencies to define the right channel mix.
  • We work with Sales Executive to determine the best way to deliver the right product to the right market, either through your existing Go-to-Market (GTM) channels or through the development of a new GTM strategy
  • We prepare business case models for customer loyalty, repurchase, and recommendation incentives, as input to defining retention strategy – optimizing the consumer lifecycle value.

5. VIABILITY AND STRATEGY ALIGNMENT
   Translating the Brand Plan into a P&L Model, to align prioritization, targets, and resource needs at C-Level, connected to the overall business strategy

• Brand Planning must not exist in a silo, but instead, have a deep connection with the overall business strategy cycle, and core processes in finance, operations and sales planning.
• We translate all Brand Plans into business case models, with a clear rationale and P&L scenarios. to be discussed through the strategy and budget process at the C-Level.
• This drives measurable targets connected to the strategy, that brand managers must be held accountable to.

6. DRIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND IMPLEMENTATION
   Using the Brand Plan and roadmap to drive organizational change

• To launch the change, we use the Brand Plans as the basis for communication to mobilize internal stakeholders; sharing the strategic intent, key decisions, and guidance for execution.
• We prepare the implementation roadmap, guiding the projects or initiatives that need to be implemented to enable the success of the new Brand Plans, with expected timelines linked to targets, and clear roles and responsibilities and deliverables.

7. MEASURE & MONITOR
   Keeping track of progress and taking corrective actions

• We develop a dashboard based on the KPIs linked to your targets and train your Brand Managers to keep track of metrics evaluating customer satisfaction, financial health and growth.
• We work with you to determine tolerance ranges and trigger points to support Brand Managers in making quick corrective actions and testing initiatives during implementation, to ensure the implementation stays on track.

8. GOVERNANCE TO ENSURE CONTINUOUS EVOLUTION
   Setting ways of working for future success

• To enable long term tracking and control, we work with you to develop new agile ways of working and a clear governance model, linked to your organizational structure.
• We prepare your teams to begin living this model from day one, putting Brand Managers in a position to work as connectors, engaging different functions, monitoring execution, evaluating performance, and reprioritizing based on the reality of the day-to-day and changing market conditions.