Services
Customer and Marketing Strategy
Navigate your course
Stakeholder expectations for growth and profitability have increased while the global business environment grows more complex and fluid. In this environment, the influence and agenda of marketing executives have expanded, yet their organizational context has not fully caught up—they often have only indirect input on many of the critical customer and marketing-related decisions enterprises need to make. Navigating these tensions is what today's chief marketing officers (CMOs) face.
In fact, marketing executives have conflicting mandates. On one hand, they are asked to set the strategy for growth, build marketing capabilities, align the organization around customer experience, drive innovation, educate the organization about new digital, social, and mobile channels and customer opportunities, and bring the voice of the customer into the enterprise. But CMOs typically are also pressured to leverage new marketing-related technologies and demonstrate near-term impact and return. Balancing the long-term view in a short-term world—and often doing so globally—is no easy task for an executive.
How we can help
Our Customer and Marketing Strategy professionals work with marketing executives, particularly CMOs, to design and deliver customer and marketing-anchored change and growth in their enterprises. Our services center on three types of customer and marketing transformations: growth and marketing transformation, marketing analytics and operations transformation, and customer experience and service transformation.
About our services
Solutions with a focus on competitive advantage. While industry benchmarks are useful, differentiation often comes from outside of industry practices and trends. Next-in-class capabilities and strategies are imperative to unlock growth and leadership. We combine this focus with industry and functional depth to bring distinctive, yet practical, insight to our engagements.
Deep empathy for the consumer. We have spent decades building an understanding of what drives consumer behavior and its implications for organizations. Success with new and blurring channels and new consumers requires a ruthless focus on understanding the drivers of consumer behavior.
Proprietary, cutting-edge methodologies. Our methods help clients achieve step changes in their growth rates and at the same time are transparent, teachable, and intuitive. And our consulting style engages client teams, uncovers and addresses internal barriers to growth, transfers knowledge, and leaves a sustainable impact on growth.
A bias for building capabilities. Sustainable organic growth is rooted in stronger marketing and customer-engagement capabilities. Our engagements are designed to build enduring marketing capabilities, including “traditional” capabilities like global brand strategy and customer insights and newer capabilities like multichannel management (digital, social, and mobile) and effective use of advanced analytics to inform decision making and marketing operations.
A fresh approach. We are committed to identifying, (re)framing, and addressing the major issues and questions relevant for each engagement. We do not promote one type of technology, provider, source of data, or outsourcing option.
A bridge for new CMOs. We design tailored transition labs that allow new CMOs to explore priorities, capabilities, talent, and relationships. The result: a six-month game plan.
Bottom-line benefits
We help our clients develop:
- Growth rate improvements of 1.5 to 2 times baseline.
- Customer loyalty and retention rate improvements of 1.5 to 2 times baseline.
- Improvements in marketing and customer-service spending effectiveness.
- Earnings per share growth through marketing actions associated with transformation strategies.
Four ways to get more value
Precision matters. Specificity about who, where, what, and why is required to identify opportunities to achieve reliable step changes in growth. The methods and tools to deliver on precision marketing are now available.
Logic and transparency are still paramount. Growth doesn’t come from opaque and poorly understood opportunities.
Barriers to growth are as important, or more so, than the drivers and motivators of growth. A company may have the best product or service even as ranked by a customer, but if it doesn’t clearly and broadly understand the barriers that emerge in the customer journey, it will not grow.
Maintain aspirational ambitions, but recognize that short-term wins are necessary. Short-term wins come with disproportionate investment, and new technologies enable learning from fast, small experiments.
Sustainable growth requires better insights, approaches, strategies, and tactics—and the ability to consistently mobilize the organization around how to capture that growth. Today’s leading marketers balance being strategists and implementers, analysts and politicians, innovators and historians, journalists and sometimes even psychologists.