Brand Positioning
We devise the perfect brand positioning strategy to fire up your new product launches or breathe new life into existing products. We leverage our deep expertise in behavioral sciences and functional/emotional drivers of preference to help you build truly iconic brands. We build detailed activation roadmaps for your brand across all of its customer touch points.
Global Brand Management
Just because your products sells in 40 countries, it does not mean that it is a global brand. We help our clients build playbooks that systematically build global mega brands that assert leadership and drive top line around the world. This is the most important way in which global marketing groups provide real value to local country general managers.
Brand Portfolio Management
Over time many companies end up with multiple brands that confuse customers. We take a systematic approach to helping you consolidate brands, plan line-extensions that drive share and sales and link corporate and product brands.
Case Study
A shift to a global brand
A leading US financial services company that sells its products in over 20 countries in Asia and Latin America, but relied largely on each country driving its own brand strategy and positioning.
The company discovered that by managing the product as a global brand and replicating best practices it could realize over $500 million in increased sales.
It developed a playbook that allowed any country to reposition the brand taking into account its own unique market conditions.
This involved repositioning the category more broadly, positioning the brand around equities that drive strong emotional preference and having a tactical plan for activating the brand around each customer touch point.
Direct Marketing
We help add direct marketing tools and techniques developed by the world's leading catalogers and credit card companies to your marketing tactics. Targeted strategies can help you win over consumers using competitive products and migrate up existing customers to a richer set of products and services. The key to winning is taking models from the best of the best but combining them with the secret formulas that drive your own business.
Loyalty Marketing
It is now well known now that customer satisfaction is not a driver of loyalty in most businesses and that understanding customer defections alone is not enough. The key to success is deciphering the code on the behaviors that cause consumers to buy less from you and the brand equities and tactics that can be leveraged to drive up customer lifetime revenues.
Data Mining for Smarter Decisions
If your business has access to consumer POS data, you may be sitting on a gold mine of information. Cerenti can show you how to tap into this data to uncover better ways to make decisions around pricing, space allocation, marketing spending and product portfolio optimization.
Case Study
A toy retailer in trouble
A leading US toy retailer was losing share to value priced retailers like Wal-Mart and Target stores.
A key initiative to retain share was to build relationships with the 30% of “guests” that accounted for over 50% of the sales.
The company launched two relationship marketing initiatives to stem the tide.
The first salvo was a battery of direct compaigns to target high value segments like new moms and grand parents to prevent them from shifting business and create new occasions for them to buy.
The second salvo was to pilot and introduce a loyalty card that drove larger basket sizes and shopping frequencies by providing the right aspirational benefits for the consumer.
Growth Strategy
Building strong brands is not simply about defining a brand architecture and positioning statement. You need specific initiatives that help you penetrate new segments, expand existing markets and improve the effectiveness of your go-to-market model. We help set the right strategy, tactics and implementation plans to building great brands that drive growth.
Global Brand Management
At most organizations strategic planning does not work. It takes too long and is usually ignored when it is time for real execution. We work with your executives to develop strategic plans based on a foundation of consumer insight, economic analysis and cross-industry learnings. They will change the decisions you make and not simply catalog them. They will prepare your business for the inevitable contingencies.
100-day Leadership Agenda
New C-level executives stepping into their leadership roles need to set a clear set of priorities for the organization early on. We serve as thought partners for these leaders, helping them quickly unearth the facts, identify critical issues and make tough organizational choices to ensure they have a smooth transition and control the dialog.
Case Study
Growth in the face of incertainity
A leading US distributor and category manager for CD's was at risk of obsolescence given the impending shift of music distribution from brick and mortar stores to digital highways.
The CEO needed to present a growth plan that positioned the company for success in the face of extreme market uncertainties about how fast consumers would shift to digital music ownership and which competing technology standards would be ultimately accepted.
The company developed a portfolio approach to strategy pursuing multiple initiatives to drive growth.
Some initiatives would do better than others depending on the market scenario, but the portfolio of initiatives would drive 15% per year overall growth for the company.
Customer Teams
Many CEO's talk about making their companies marketing and consumer led. Very few actually succeed in doing so. Take a test drive and walk into any of the top marketing companies in the world, be it Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, Kraft or Unilever. Who you see there and what they do daily is very different from what these other so called marketing led companies do. Becoming marketing led is less about talk and more about changing the skills, capabilities and the processes by which you manage your marketing and business everyday.
Sales and channel footprint design
CEO's that are truly interested in transforming their companies into a marketing business must start with a “whatever it takes” attitude and lead the effort themselves. We help CEO's craft a 100 Week Marketing Agenda that helps them rapidly recast every aspect their company into a consumer centric mold. It changes everything and yet does not destroy the spirit and core essence of their business.
Sales and channel effectiveness
The 100 Week Marketing Agenda reshapes your organization, marketing strategy, strategic planning, performance measurements, brands, sales approach, customer service and other go-to-market systems. The program is only for the bold and committed and results in an order of magnitude increase in the market cap of the company.
Case Study
Electronics Company Gains Efficiency
A leading European consumer electronics products company had over time become a lumbering giant, slow and unresponsive to its customers, losing share to Japanese and Korean competitors.
A $20 million plus initiative was launched to transform strategic planning, key accounts management, market research, competitive intelligence, product management and innovation.
The key to success – the CEO's vision and mindset that for the company the transformation program was “not an expense but a capital investment in its people and capability to compete profitably”.
Customer Teams
At the end of the day, for many businesses, the brand goes to market through the feet on the ground. Unfortunately, sales personnel are often neither strategic nor brand oriented. We use a pragmatic and road-tested methodology for turning your account teams into customer leadership teams.
We leverage behavioral sciences to develop incredibly impactful messaging and tactics to accelerate adoption and usage of your brands. These thoughtful strategies create measurable value for customers and allow you to fairly share in the increased returns.
Sales and channel footprint design
Customers have been downsized over and over and have little time for the army of reps that calls on them. We help you figure out how to combine sales reps, direct marketing, and the Internet to touch customers at the right point of the acquisition and development cycle. We figure out the role of distribution and the scale of the network you need to effectively take your brand to market.
Sales and channel effectiveness
Even for a given sales and channel footprint there is much you can do to improve performance. We help you better align your sales and distribution incentives to your brand imperatives and growth plans. We help you organize and set benchmarks for the go-to-market sales processes.
Case Study
A television manufacturer reorganizes for global operations
A leading European manufacturer of television tubes faced challenges in coordinating its sales and service interactions with customers all of whom had global operations.
Each team in Asia, Latin America and EU acted somewhat independently leading to confusion for the customer and low customer profitability.
Sales and marketing was reorganized into global customer teams with clear leadership roles and strategies for serving each customer and improving profits.
The plans were updated quarterly and used as a living and breathing document of intent and action.
A sales force automation system was deployed only after the process was up and running and delivering results.
