Functional Expertise
Analytics
Digital technologies have produced an explosion of raw data that first must be organized, and then refined and converted to information to be useful. The sheer quantity of new data to be managed in the age of search and multichannel commerce is challenging, as it has been suggested that 90% of the world's data has been created in the last two years. But seeking patterns with predictive value, particularly in customer behavior, requires rarefied skills, both scientific and artful. We help clients develop new capabilities, analytic and organizational, to leverage data.
Competitive Strategy
We help clients in consumer businesses better position themselves in their arenas of competition, and develop distinctive value propositions for customers, exert leverage over suppliers, raise barriers to entry for potential competitors, and guard against substitutions. While our approach emphasizes developing skilled excellence in the fundamentals of buying and selling, we seek advantage for our clients through the strategic use of information, and agility in adjusting structurally to customer preferences.
Digital Strategy
Our research indicates firms that have embraced enabling technologies across channels outperform those which have not. Digital strategy is a fast-moving, innovation-fueled function that is best when focused on supporting and enhancing the customer experience in or out of stores, which is increasingly viewed by analysts as a journey of six steps: awareness, selection, transaction, delivery, post-purchase care, and advocacy. The highest performing firms consistently invest in enabling technologies, specifically organize to manage innovation, structure significant components of IT architecture to pursue customer behavior insight, and embrace Agile Development methodologies to keep pace with change. We help clients develop and implement digital strategy that allows customer conversion from any point on their journey and on any channel.
Finance and Planning
Pre-season demand, inventory, and margin planning sets the parameters from which the expense structure is determined, and profit targets are met. Diligent in-season management, driven by a strong forecasting capability, allows a firm to react to the realities of the busiiness landscape as they evolve over time, and make necessary adjustments to achieve the plan. While this function is a fundamental discipline central to successful performance, our experience suggests firms often have varied approaches and plan suboptimally. While some firms' planning processes provide less than adequate inputs and outputs, other firms have buried themselves in an overly complex planning process that distracts from the core activities of buying and selling, and diminishes performance. Our teams include some of the industry's foremost practitioners in planning and forecasting, and in process development. We help clients develop highly effective planning processes. .
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Marketing
Customer purchase decisions are increasingly information driven, and information is sourced across multiple platforms as customers journey from product awareness through selection, transaction, and delivery, seeking different influencers and content at each step along the path. Typically, at the awareness stage, expert content is sought from credible and neutral third party sources. As customer knowledge grows and the customer nears selection, content from the brand itself becomes more trusted and influential. Post purchase, with the right effort at relationship building, customers can become the staunchest of advocates as word-of-mouth has been subsumed by the ubiquitous online review. Building brands and winning customers requires omnichannel companies to develop new skills in measuring customer behavior across devices and between online and store channels, and in devising and delivering at the right moment through the right medium rich content from the most relevant source. We help clients build brands and win customers in the age of digitally enabled commerce.
Operations
Merchandising, stores, ecommerce, and supply chain logistics are the core operating functions in consumer businesses. We have significant expertise in product and assortment development and global sourcing for wholesale brands and vertical retailers. Our knowledge of demand forecasting, allocation, replenishment, and probability-based inventory control are second to none. We are expert in the mechanics of store operations, staffing, and service. Our experience with digital strategy extends into website design and operation, SEM, and SEO, and we architect the infrastructure linkages between store and ecommerce channels across multiple devices to fully realize the promise of omnichannel marketing. Finally, we are expert in distribution and fulfillment logistics for stores, ecommerce, and
wholesale distribution. We help clients achieve process excellence by design in core operating functions.
Organization
Consumer business models have rapidly evolved through digital enablement, yet organization structure and capability to support the new models, particularly omnichannel, have lagged, and are often inadequate to address the stress of growth. Rapidly growing companies often neglect to periodically assess their core process architecture and the organization capability required to achieve excellence. Increasingly, data and technology driven companies also must acquire agile development skills for rapid, continuous process and technical change to better know and serve customers. We help clients design fundamental processes and acquire organization capability to support their unique competitive strategies and achieve growth.