Are you looking to create a strong brand portfolio that is executed consistently at every touchpoint?

Our Services

Review our service offerings so you can achieve fully integrated plans to create strong brand portfolios that come to life consistently in every touchpoint.

Integrated Planning

  • Integrated planning between Sales and Marketing teams can lead to better collaboration, execution of strategies, and improved business performance. However, it requires a change in behaviors, ways of working, and trust within the commercial organization. The aim of integrated planning is to combine sales and marketing efforts to produce manageable plans that deliver the category and business strategy, 3-year and 1-year plans, execution and post execution analysis so in the end your brand comes to life consistently in all channels. This is done by identifying critical objectives and creating fresh, bold, quantified, and clear plans that transform strategy into action.

Insights & Analytics

  • Insights and analytics are at the core of your entire strategy to achieve the goals set. Understanding your situation analysis, consumer, shopper, channel & customer insights and trends with a thorough analysis of the brand’s health, channel and customer performance is the very first step in developing integrated business plans. We help you drive growth and engagement through data-driven insights using proven and innovative research processes and techniques. We can help you conduct quantitative or qualitative research studies, such as surveys, focus groups, or ethnographic studies, to gather consumer and shopper needs, preferences, on-line and offline behaviors, and attitudes that can inform marketing and product development strategies. We can help you with channel and customer insights with sales data analytics, channel audits, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention to optimize distribution and sales channels driving purchase across omni-channels.

Brand Marketing

  • The brand marketing capability program covers various components, including brand strategy, which involves defining the target audience, brand positioning to experience, voice, look & feel, fluency devices, messaging, and the overall brand promise. We push for creative excellence ensuring brand emotional connections are built at every touchpoint for connected brand experiences. We review key principles of brand distinctiveness, mental and physical availability, long-term brand building efforts and the importance of measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of brand campaigns using metrics such as brand salience, penetration, consideration, conversion.

Trade & Shopper Marketing

  • Shopper marketing capability programs cover a range of topics to teach cross functional teams composed of Brand Marketing, Trade & Shopper Marketing and Sales how to understand the difference between consumers and shoppers with a key focus on understanding the shopper trip mission, their mindset as they go through the omnichannel path to purchase. By developing a deeper understanding of shoppers and optimizing their in-store, on premise or e-commerce experience, organizations can drive sales growth, build brand loyalty, and win with retailers. We can also go deeper and help you with Point of Sale Material design and effectiveness to make sure your POSM is working hard to deliver the objectives set.

Category Selling Stories

  • Customers care about category growth so your customer plans need to be designed to increase value for the category and show how your programs will be beneficial for the entire category not just your brands. Understanding your customer needs, their business priorities, their shopper needs, what is happening in the industry, the insights and trends that will drive growth and how your brand portfolio can help to drive category value needs to be a priority in your plan. Who are the right stakeholders to have joint planning meetings that are for long term strategic planning, the timing for these meetings to take place so that you can have planning meetings that do not get into pricing negotiations, these and more are the things that we can coach your teams to develop strong category selling stories that your customers will want to engage with you on.

Channel Strategy

  • A clear category and brand portfolio strategy will tell you what categories you want to play in and what brand portfolio you will use to play in those categories. You now need to develop the right channel strategy to define where you want your brand portfolio to be present in. This must be done very early in the 3 year strategic planning process and followed up annually. A big mistake is when channel strategy is looked at after Brand Marketing has done their annual plans. This is way too late. It needs to be done at the 3 year strategy level first and then reviewed early in the annual integrated planning process to achieve optimal success.

    Do you have clear channel roles, priority channel targets, success metrics defined? Have you worked jointly to understand what are you priority categories and brands by channel? Do you need to partner with a distributor, wholesaler or other third party to get your brands to become available in certain places? What is the optimal sales service model to service your customers? Are you tracking these monthly?

    A strong channel strategy will help you answer all these questions.

Channel Road Mapping

  • Mapping your channels is a critical process to unlock business growth that involves combining channel and sub-channel insight with commercial data and growth forecasts leading to the development of a fact-based channel roadmap for growth. To achieve this, current channel splits are mapped against market factors such as margin delivery, market share, and cost to serve as well as consumer and shopper habits to ensure the right brands, categories are in the right channels and subchannels. Industry forecast data is then used to extrapolate future channel splits to be ahead of the game. Key considerations for future performance and profitability are identified. Each channel/sub channel is prioritized with defined key roles based on growth, profit, scale, and brand building potential. Channel road mapping is essential to develop a good Channel Strategy and be able to execute it.

Channel Execution PICOS

  • The culmination of your integrated plans is the Picture of Success (PICOS). This is your blueprint for your sales team to have clear direction to focus on the strategic priorities as they have very limited time per customer. Your PICOS will define the priority brands, packs with the right pricing strategy by sub-channel. It must ensure the right placement in the path to purchase and on the shelf whether digital or physical with the right presentation and proper activation of the marketing and promotional programs. We can show you how to develop the PICOS grounded in a deep understanding of shopper behavior in different channels and segments to create a clear picture of success in each market. It emphasizes the need for execution standards that align with channel roles and strategies, and the development of repeatable models for global rollout based on the success of lead markets. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of understanding customer values and ensuring collaboration and buy-in from markets for success.

Monthly Commercial Reviews

  • The Commercial Monthly Reviews are the most important meeting that happens in the month to review the prior month performance and the S&OP (Sales & Operations) meetings. In this critical meeting the full commercial team and the full senior leadership team review all the plans on the calendar and ensure there is alignment between all commercial functions on the execution of the calendar, consider corrective actions, gap closures or budget reallocation to commercial plan based on the joint KPIs and prior month performance. The output of this session provides the right inputs into the Sales & Operation meeting to make sure the right quantities are being produced and going to market. A Commercial Monthly Review meeting will definitively increase of execution quality, transparency and collaboration across functions and it is a critical checkpoint of the business priorities reviewing plans that are still in concept stage to full-fledged and aligned Sales and Marketing execution plans pre-aligned with Customers.

Capability & Competencies

  • As an organization defines their strategy they need to define the organizational structure, the roles and responsibilities of the functions and individuals to achieve the strategy. Commercial functions need capability building and individuals need competency improvements.

    We can help you develop Team Functional Capability Assessments with detailed assessment of the current Organizational capabilities required by function to achieve the business goals vs the current level of capability. We would benchmark capability against industry leading companies and support you in an end to end organizational design of what it takes to win with a special focus in establishing the right Trade & Shopper and Sales by channel organizational structures including roles, accountabilities and implied ways of working.

    In addition we can support you on Individual Competency Assessment Frameworks working closely with the commercial team and HR. Management needs to understand the key skills and competencies required of each individual, their role and the skills needed at the right competency level required for the job. Developing an Individual Competency Assessment Framework will review the skills, behaviors, knowledge and experience required by each individual to perform well in a role. The framework captures for each job role in your team, the required standard for that competency along a number of key dimensions and enables individuals to understand and take control of their own development and for the organization to identify competency gaps, so that any capability and training interventions can be effectively scoped and targeted.

Coaching & Mentoring

  • As the founder, coaching and mentoring holds a special place in my heart. I have been coaching and mentoring individuals for many years. I have a methodology I like to use where I start with MyStory where we get to know each other, we hone in on your aspirations, your gaps, the areas you are working on personally and professionally. Through a lot of introspective analysis I have found that my purpose is to help people achieve their maximum potential whether personally or professionally. I can help you from simple things like reviewing your resume or CV or trying to find the right approach to grow your career or helping you think through work challenges and so on. Every year I will take on a few people on a pro-bono basis based on need whether it be just a couple of virtual meetings or monthly meetings for a year. Reach out and let’s chat.