Branding
Brands can be a company’s most valuable intangible assets. Our research has indicated that companies with strong brands earn up to 5 percentage points higher total return to shareholders than their industry counterparts. While part of this return is attributable to better current performance, the rest reflects the expectation that a powerful brand will be successfully expanded into new channels, geographies, and businesses. Yet most companies fail to capture as much as 25 percent of potential incremental growth because they do not leverage the full equity of existing brands. Companies can seize the opportunity to build on existing brand assets by developing distinctive and highly relevant customer-focused benefit platforms, both rational and emotional. Superior returns come when companies continually enhance and expand on their brand promise, and customers feel that brands deliver consistently on their promise at key customer touch points.

CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) converts information about customers into a rich asset for performance improvement. The more complete an understanding a company has of its customer base, the more opportunity there is to use analytics to implement customer-facing initiatives in targeted ways that achieve measurable impact.CRM is fundamentally a strategic approach to managing customer value and experiences. It is not a technology solution. However, technology is often an enabler of the benefits that accrue from a well-crafted customer strategy, superior analytics, and innovative programs.

Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy innovators are unlocking enormous value and creating leadership in their industries. Their success reflects an insightful response to new customer behavior as well as an ability to capture the potential of new marketing technologies. In many cases, these marketers are shifting away from a traditional marketing approach that focuses solely on functional benefits such as quality or reliability. By highlighting and enhancing process and relationship benefits, marketing innovators are creating superior value for customers.

When we help a client with its strategic development process, our fundamental focus is on understanding current and emerging customer needs. Over the years, we are involved in many marketing strategy engagements across a wide variety of industries. This involvement provides us with unique insights into customer needs and how they are changing. At the same time, our ongoing research partnerships provide us with specific insights into emerging needs and support our development of innovative customer-driven strategies for clients. We also draw on our in-depth understanding of key marketing levers to ensure we help craft creative yet readily implemented strategies.

Sales & Channel Management
Over the years, we have developed leading-edge approaches to diverse sales challenges. We combine traditional expertise in business strategy and customer profitability with a deep understanding of our clients’ fundamental sales and channel issues: rapidly changing customer needs, evolving technology, selling models, multiple channel management, sales force and manager skill building, compensation and organizational issues, and innovative go-to-market strategies. Our typical approach to strategy design involves equal focus on customer needs and the client’s economic and organizational capabilities. Understanding both customer segment needs and the client’s cost-to-serve requirements ensures profitability.

We then work with the client to develop go-to-market strategies tailored for each customer segment. These strategies frequently involve selecting the right mix of selling models (consultative versus transactional) and selling methods (face-to-face versus technology-enabled). In conjunction with the go-to-market strategy, we design an implementation plan that takes into account the roles, skills, organizational capabilities, performance evaluation, and compensation changes required for the client’s success.