Identifing Brand Size-of-Prize

Issue

A global category leader, playing in the mainstream wanted to dramatically grow its share of the premium market within five years. How to achieve this in terms of which markets and with what portfolio were unclear and it raised a number of tough internal questions about how far the brand could stretch.

Approach

Cognosis analysed 40 markets and built a bespoke category evolution model that forecasted category growth and its type (premium/ mainstream). Unlike most ‘left-brain’ forecasting models based purely on market/category factors this model added intuitive consumer and global trends, making it far more meaningful and powerful for in-market recipients.

Prize

The model identified and scaled key opportunity markets and highlighted the critical brand and product innovation opportunities needed to fill the gaps. Globally it delivered a completely new portfolio/ investment strategy and was a critical input into the decision to make a $900m brand acquisition.

Contact: Justin Bater

Sharpening strategy & aligning stakeholders

Issue

A leading international hotel brand needed to establish a competitive platform based on the brand’s loyalty programme. The company faced increasing competition and lacked a clear strategy and internal commitment/alignment. Attempts had been made to drive this internal alignment for the past 2 years.

Approach

Using our Leadership Agenda Framework*, we were able to capture & align internal perspectives, assess the potential ‘Size-of-Prize’, and build a strategy for growth. The qualitative and quantitative analysis complemented each other, representing a truly whole-minded approach—combining hard facts, process, creativity, and internal beliefs.

Prize

As a result, the programme’s vision, strategic goals and key principles were defined, aligning key internal stakeholders and securing incremental internal budgets for faster growth of the programme. Projected future worth of this programme, if realised, is a 10% increase in revenue.

Contact: Catarina Garrido

Developing on-trade channel strategies

Issue

In our work with a major consumer goods company, the international Marketing Director’s critical business issue was how to develop robust on-trade channel strategies in its top 15 markets. The on-trade had been identified as the #1 priority ‘brand-building’ channel.

Approach

Our work delivered an internationally aligned approach to understanding and building channel strategy. The in-market approach enabled the Marketing Director to drive renewed commitment to the channel and mobilised local teams around agreed targets.

Prize

To date, 14 out of the top 15 markets have developed new channel strategies focussed on delivering growth for international and local priority brands.

Contact: Mark Adams

Engaging a ‘left-brained’ organisation

Issue

With the Energy industry going through radical change, competition intensifying and consumers increasingly ‘shopping around’, our client needed to get clear on its longer-term strategy quickly: how/ where was it going to compete and win? This meant taking the counter-culture step of looking beyond this year, beyond price and beyond the numbers. A step that had failed twice already!

Approach

Put simply we injected a new, highly collaborative and consumer/customer centric strategy-making approach into the business that put the numbers ‘in their place’. We built a set of stakeholders/project teams and guided them through a challenging process that emphasised the building of a shared vision/common purpose in relation to the industry’s future and the business’ aspirations.

Prize

After two failed attempts and a frustrated/increasingly disempowered Leadership Team, the business finally had a common five-year vision, a robust and customer-driven goals, strategy-plan and an18-month plan that provided clarity on the major priorities (what needed to be done). It has laid the foundation for a re-energised Leadership Team (incl COO), and the roll-out of a cross organisation engagement programme to align employees—create a genuine shared sense of purpose.

Developing a premium brand operating model

Issue

A highly successful and profitable beer company was a late entrant into the international premium beer category. The client needed to catch-up and find a way to change the organisational mindset from local market, high volume, mainstream beer (ultra efficient model) to a differentiated, premium brand building international business. The ‘operating model’ was to be the ‘how to’ (i.e. change management frameworks and key activities NOT brand strategies) so the Regional & local businesses had a clear planning & action route map

Approach

Sponsored by the Global CEO helped give the programme teeth, but it still required a highly collaborative approach to allow for the local market perspectives to be listened to and the ‘solution’ to be owned by the organisation. Three phases of development: 1) listening to the organisation to understand the needs / issues, 2) high level development of the ‘operating principles and model’ 3) the ‘how to’ content development (how to apply this in practice.) Involved multi-functional, cross market teams (up to 100 client participants during the development phase) managed by Cognosis

Prize

After 12 months the Operating Model and mandated Principles (Marketing Investment, Organisational structure, Rewards, application of common Marketing disciplines) was launched globally championed by Excom and the Regional MD for Europe. Created a fundamentally new approach to international brands management and gave Group Marketing a clear role with mandate tools to challenge launch plans and track brand performance . 3 years later the work is still regarded as fundamental to their international brand success and building new capabilities.

Redefining the brand proposition

Issue

A major tobacco company’s most important international brand’s proposition was becoming blurred and outdated, which threatened the company’s future as a premium brand/high margin producer. A poorly defined brand meant different directions being taken in each major market.

Approach

Our approach was to coordinate consumer research across 9 markets and conduct depth interviews with key internal stakeholders, to gain universal and relevant insights to the consumer & brand. We developed brand proposition hypotheses with the central marketing team, and then held a 2-day workshop with 25 market representatives to finalise and agree the global proposition.

Prize

The result was a rejuvenated, differentiated brand proposition, based on relevant consumer insights, with buy-in from key stakeholders across all major markets.

Rediscovering the brand to a new generation

Issue

The challenge facing a scotch whiskey CEO was to rediscover, revitalise and relaunch the brand to a new generation of consumers around the world, remotivating management, distributors and the trade, many of whom had lost all interest in it.

Approach

Cognosis were brought in to work very closely with the management team, helping to build the brand repositioning, marketing strategy/guidelines and the critical On Trade focus. We supported and coached management through distributor engagement activity across the key markets over several months, to re-engergise the distribution network.

Prize

The programme continues today, with a new energy from distributors yielding dramatic results in several major markets, and a management team inspired with new enthusiasm and confidence.

Developing a pricing strategy

Issue

The client lacked clarity about pricing tiers in the vodka market. Despite the success of their main brand, they were not certain of where each of their vodka brands should play and which markets and pricing segments offered the biggest opportunity for future growth.

Approach

Our approach was to design and build a comprehensive database of global vodka volumes and pricing data, and from this extract trends and key dynamics in each market. This allowed us to establish price segments for each market and record the size and dynamics in each price segment, giving insight into future growth areas.

Prize

The output frameworks provided the client with a clear understanding of where their brands sat in each market and to what degree overlaps or gaps existed in their portfolio. It also gave them insight into how competitors were positioned. Finally, the global ‘Size of Prize’ output provided important guidance for their strategic planning.

Conducting a portfolio analysis

Issue

A strong player in the US whisky market was (with two notable exceptions) enjoying limited success in the rest of the world.

Approach

To help, Cognosis analysed 40 markets, to determine the relative attractiveness of each market and then forecast the brand potential in the context of the viability of the opportunity and the company’s ability to leverage it.

Prize

The result was a set of market clusters, grouped by strategic imperative and relative attractiveness to the business. This has become the starting point for decision making, the company’s global expansion and investment strategy.

Developing & implementing Competitive Gaming Workshops

Issue

Future regulatory change (including the removal of trade barriers and minimum pricing) threaten to change the rules of a previously stable and profitable Asian tobacco market. How would the competitors react to the new world, what would their strategic options be, and how would that reflect on our clients strategy and planning for the future? Every business goes through the motions of completing a competitor SWOT and writing a few bullets about competitor strategy, but what impact does this really have on strategy planning?

Approach

Our approach was to take the management team and make them live and breath the competition for two days. Each member of the leadership team was assigned to a competitor group. For two days groups had to behave, speak, present and think like the competitor. The groups immersed themselves in their competitor mindset—eventually viewing the market through the competitor’s eyes—and built out a full strategic plan for their competitor developing robust & detailed plans. Groups were also subjected to unexpected market events to ensure all strategic options were fully explored. The output from this session was then distilled into key implications, which were used to build and stress test future strategic options.

Prize

The exercise offered the leadership team a completely new market perspective, providing a framework to push the boundaries of their thinking and challenging pre-conceptions and assumptions. The team identified 3 key areas in which they needed to reassess their strategic options and build more robust strategies for the future. In addition to breaking new ground the exercise built confidence and belief amongst the team that in many areas their strategy was absolutely fit for the future.

Creating a corporate growth strategy

Issue

How do you improve on 40% growth each year for the past 10 years? That was the challenge the new CEO of an innovative, dynamic, multinational beer company set us. The output to be a clear, simple, 3-year strategy which would excite employees and investors alike, was underpinned by rigorous analysis, and built on specific market/product recommendations.

Approach

We quickly decided any strategy capable of delivering accelerated growth in a short timeframe, needed not only to be highly focused but also needed to be understood and owned by every member of the client team from day one. Therefore instead of formulating our recommended strategy and then selling it to the client, we ran a series of strategy workshops with the client in which our analysis and recommendations were inputs and hinted at a potential direction. Final recommendations were agreed collaboratively.

Prize

Six months after the completion of the strategy development process sales growth is accelerating +45%, new channels have successfully been entered (on-trade), the business is now restructured for greater growth, and the company goal of becoming a top ten brand looks easily achievable. Incremental funding from the city to accelerate future international growth has been achieved.

Translating strategy into action

Issue

The Executive Team of a Consumer Health Care division within a global Pharmaceutical company needed to communicate their strategy in a way which ensured every individual understands the contribution they need to make in order to make the strategy happen. Their previous experience of sharing the strategy with market leadership teams and giving them responsibility for translating it into specific actions/initiatives/behaviours had failed.

Approach

We treated the initiative as a brand communication strategy – segment the audience, develop relevant and compelling messages for each group, and develop an interesting and sustained communication ‘campaign’, to create a multi-stage and multi-channel campaign to ensure the messages reach the intended targets. This also involves market leaders to ensure their acceptance/adoption of the central campaign.

Prize

The project is at an early stage, but we believe the programme will not only ensure market teams are clear on the contribution they need to make, but will also ensure they actively want to make a strong contribution and how it affects their day-to-day behaviours and tasks.

Putting consumers & brands at the heart of business

Issue

A newly created Consumer Health Care division of a global Pharmaceutical company wanted to establish the consumer and brand thinking at the heart of the business. The issue was that most team members had come from the main business where the thinking was about doctors & patients (rather than consumers), ingredients (rather than benefits), and products (rather than brands).

Approach

Rather than addressing the functional brand strategy and cultural team capability needs separately, we combined the two. We developed and ran a series of global brand strategy sessions which started from consumer needs and ended with the creation of brand positionings which could accommodate a number of products based on an objective marketing/brand assessment and analytical rigour. By inviting market teams to participate in these sessions we not only developed strong strategies but also started the process of getting market teams to start from the consumer.

Prize

For the first time, the business is thinking about consumers rather than patients, what they want, how to talk to them, and how to reach them. All new product innovations are now planned under existing brand names rather than being seen as products each requiring the creation of a new brand name and investment to establish and support them. We changed the way they work. The goal for this business unit is now much more bullish—double their size in 4 years to €1 billion in revenue utilising brands as the primary driver.

Assessing innovation opportunities

Issue

One of the world’s leading soft drinks companies had an idea for a fantastic new functional soft drink, but wasn’t sure how big the commercial opportunity was, where the key markets might be, or how to position the concept. Often, buoyed by the excitement of identifying a new idea, companies move into product development, creative development and consumer research without having first established the commercial potential.

Approach

Instead of the traditional—and expensive—approach of commissioning consumer research at this early stage in the process, we undertook an in-depth commercial ‘size of prize’ evaluation using a myriad of different consumer and commercial data sources. This evaluation identified the size of the commercial opportunity, the key markets and the optimal positioning territories within the markets at ¼ the cost of traditional consumer research!

Prize

By conducting a ‘size of prize’ analysis up front we helped the client identify that it was worth pursuing and focused its development around key markets and concepts – saving them hundreds of thousands of pounds in cost and time and identifying future opportunities with the potential of 1.5 million unit cases.

Setting a powerful leadership agenda

Issue

Where next for a stellar brand that has grown well beyond expectations? Multiple stakeholders, divergent views and a lack of clarity about the future, threaten to stifle further growth. How can the central brand team align behind a clear and powerful leadership agenda to ensure future success across multiple markets?

Approach

The only way to get alignment and clarity was to create time, space and the right framework to tackle the big issues. These big issues were framed, providing an objective viewpoint based on analytical rigour and one-on-one internal scoping interviews. That work informed a subsequent innovative workshop to ensure difficult discussions were handled in an open and constructive manner.

Prize

A powerful Leadership Agenda* underpinned by clarity, commitment and passion across the team. A clear view on the roadmap for the next 3 years which will form the foundation for potential growth of hundreds of millions of dollars. Resolution on the big issue facing the brand (how to develop the brand equity). An issue which had divided the team for a number of years and regularly undermined the teams focus and effectiveness had been eradicated.

Aligning group functions with markets

Issue

The Global Marketing Team and Regional markets did not share a common vision for the business. While the Marketing Team tried to drive a more brand oriented mindset, regional teams needed tools to allow them to meet their commercial goals. As a result, business performance was compromised.

Approach

Reasons for misalignment were explored using HBDI Profiling, the Organisational Culture Model and by gathering internal perspectives. Together, both teams built a joint Team Leadership Charter, defining their common goals, ways-of-working to improve cooperation and new capability building.

Prize

Sense of a unified team and a new strategy planning process involving greater interaction between the 2 teams created a renewed sense of direction. The greater 2-way communication is leading to the identification of new business opportunities in the markets & engagement with third parties.

Discovering the corporate vision & strategy

Issue

Four key issues were driving an uninspired and unaligned Management team, running a “challenger” business with an inefficient ‘reactive’ mentality and a highly competitive environment:

1. No clear long-term vision and strategy
2. Short-term profit focussed mentality
3. UK management team in transition
4. Strained relationship between UK business and International Hub

Approach

Using our Leadership Agenda Framework, we developed a fresh, 3-year vision and strategy that uncovered the essence and distinctiveness of the corporate brand. The Senior Team reorganised around a new vision & stretch goal with targeted strategic initiatives which were designed to instil a sense of purpose and alignment across the whole team.

Prize

A committed UK team of 60 managers, led by an aligned Management Team. This vision and strategy was successfully rolled out across all levels of the UK business for the first time to ensure engagement and ongoing implementation—with personal accountability and commitments to making this a reality. A detailed action plan with realistic key timings and a progress tracker linked activities to 3-year financial targets which included doubling revenue and tripling profit.

Developing an international portfolio strategy

Issue

A new central strategy team needed to establish itself and demonstrate value-added support to the markets. The organisation has a heavy focus towards analytical planning with strategy being centrally developed amongst a limited group.

Approach

We developed a programme that focused on stress testing the existing strategy: understanding the opportunities and challenges through rigour, and analytical assessment of markets, brands, trade and competitors; probing key issues through one-on-one interviews; identifying the priorities; and driving through to action. This was delivered through a highly interactive workshop for all the key stakeholders at a market and central level, focusing on brand portfolio strategy.

Prize

Local teams were able to advance their thinking and build alignment, commitment and belief around their strategies. Central stakeholders were able to fully understand challenges that markets faced allowing them to input planning and provide better on-going support.

The central strategy team has rolled these workshops out to over 15 markets so far and has used it as a platform to develop a range of other programmes to support markets including Competitive Gaming and Portfolio Rationalisation.

Developing an international strategy

Issue

The International Division of a Global Spirits Company were given a stretch target by its parent that required them to approach strategy development differently. The President of the International business took the ‘brave’ step to go against the global strategy consulting partner as he believed there needed to be a different approach to challenging the status quo. They also needed to build and drive leadership teamwork.

Approach

Working with the Leadership Team (functional VP’s & regional MD’s) Cognosis created a vision and goal that they believed in, made explicit the assumptions / challenges, gained buy-in to the strategy development programme, and delivered growth-driving results. We worked with the strategy team, refining their approach, to allow far greater debate and challenge through in-market workshops to stress test the assumptions. We worked closely with the Marketing, HR and Finance VP’s to drive the thinking across all markets and aligned with the parent and created a robust 5-year bottom-up/top-down strategic plan.

Prize

An aligned and engaged Leadership Team held an objective debate for the first time on resource allocation against collective and market goals. Clear brand / market priorities and initiatives were agreed and identified by the Leadership Team and markets –a ‘joined-up’ strategy with robust numbers and high levels of emotional engagement across the business to drive action. As a result ,12 months later, goals were exceeded, new capabilities were built, and a more effective Leadership Team was in place (President delighted by the outcome, and is now an advocate of Cognosis!)

Making Corporate Social Responsibility tangible

Issue

Central to any major energy company’s future growth strategy is a strong Energy Services offer. This was particularly so for our client with a critical CSR agenda/partnership. However, with no coherent strategy, few energy-efficiency products and confused ownership, this part of the business needed a dramatic kick-start.

Approach

Because the footprint of ownership, information and opinion was broad & shared across the organisation – a major cause of the lack of strategy to date – we created a ‘rapid response’ project mindset: key data only into one ‘fact book’, strict interviewee shortlist, simple ‘big-bets’ scaling exercise. All involved drove to a one-day workshop where a ‘straw man’ was used to drive reactions/ agreement/alignment—and priorities & actions.

Prize

Within 8 weeks, the Eco-Efficiency Services strategy, team and way of working was established. Organisational confidence and ‘fit’ with sustainability branding/agenda has been achieved, with the result that additional resources have been secured. In addition, the project has forged clear ownership and delivered personal success for our client – they have a mandate to lead.

Achieving excellence in Trade Marketing

Issue

A major FMCG company identified trade marketing and in-store marketing as the critical future competitive battleground. The global team wanted to develop a trade marketing framework and practices which would improve the capabilities of all their market teams around the world. The issue was how to do this in a highly de-centralised company where central initiatives are often rejected.

Approach

For the central initiative to gain market acceptance it needed to be seen as a response to needs they had identified. We therefore spent time listening to markets and positioning the framework as a response to this. Similarly we rejected the idea of transplanting best practice from outside the company and placed the emphasis on identifying and sharing internal best practice. Using this approach we successfully built trade marketing practices against 25 different areas which are shared via a variety of vehicles from workshop to in-market secondments to websites.

Prize

As a result of the Trade Marketing Excellence Programme, market share in many markets has improved and because greater knowledge-sharing is taking place, less money is being requested by markets for new research and process/practice development projects.

Improving the innovation process

Issue

One of the world’s leading soft drinks companies wanted to improve their innovation idea generation process. The current process was resulting in the generation of ‘lots of small’ market specific innovation ideas rather than a ‘few big ideas’ that could be developed across markets.

Approach

We conducted a detailed review of the current process and identified two main contributing factors 1) absence of clear commercial criteria, 2) cultural norm which regarded the number of ideas generated as the indicator of success. Rather than simply recommending alterations to the process, we instead offered to facilitate a number of sessions in which we incorporated new goals and ways of working. The success of these sessions then made gathering support for the process alterations far easier to obtain.

Prize

‘Fewer bigger ideas’ are being generated, leading to individual projects receiving greater R&D and marketing resources and investment and thus helping maximise their chances of achieving category breakthroughs.

Responding to a changing environment

Issue

A major university was coming under increasing pressure from new competition in a rapidly changing environment. The organisation needed to respond quickly—and create an internal environment open to organisational change.

Approach

Cognosis were asked to help create a strategy for continued market leadership and develop a ‘blueprint’ for building an effective future oriented marketing planning capability. Additionally, we used organisational culture profiling to understand how key stakeholder groups would react to and handle change.

Prize

The resulting comprehensive change programme gained the commitment of the Exec and staff, as is considered by the client to be the single most significant piece of consulting that the University has bought in the last 5 years.

Differentiating a consumer-focused portfolio

Issue

A global soft drink producer had no established process for monitoring and addressing consumer need state changes in a major developing market, and as a result found it difficult to offer a differentiated consumer-focused portfolio.

Approach

Cognosis’ approach was to coordinate consumer research groups across the country to map existing brands against need states, identify drivers of choice, and garner any other relevant consumer insights. A 2-day workshop with key market stakeholders was then run to agree a differentiated proposition for each brand that could integrate easily into brand planning and activation.

Prize

The integrated framework produced provided differentiated, but clearly targeted propositions, allowing for revenue maximisation from the portfolio. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the existing portfolio and need states allowed for a much clearer approach to new product development.

Turning strategy into action

Issue

The Head of Catalogue Marketing at a major film distributor called us in the help them communicate a complicated DVD pricing strategy internally. The main issue they faced was turning quite a dull and complex subject into something easily understandable. An incorrect understanding of the pricing strategy could prove seriously loss making.

Approach

In conjunction with the client we developed an engaging pin-ball machine metaphor, categorising the pricing model into five different scenarios, and helping to make sense of thousands of possible permutations by applying some simple ‘rules’. We then built an electronic tool for the sales and marketing team to use which allows them to quickly ascertain which DVD titles lie in which pricing band at any one point in time.

Prize

As a result, the sales team are now enabled to quickly negotiate more effective in-store promotions with their customers such as HMC and Tesco. This has lead to more constructive customer conversations around mutual needs.

Developing a brand strategy

Issue

A global brewer faced a lack of belief and focus on the company’s international premium brands driven by their relatively small volume compared to local mainstream brands. “Capability gaps” meant a mainstream approach to premium branding, damaging the brand equity and reinforcing lack of belief.

Approach

Highly collaborative approach backed on facilitating global experts within the organisation to develop the solution and minimise rejection (management of 10 global work streams, 80+ participants). Developed a globally applicable, comprehensive operating model for how to launch and build sustainable international premium brands—web enabled for easy global reference, supported by appropriate training materials.

Prize

Established common global language and approach for International Premium Brands. Greater focus, confidence and belief in the International Brand portfolio. Senior level commitment and buy-in to the solution.