Marketing



Challenges

Today, more than ever, marketing must play a role in achieving overall company objectives. CEOs across all industries are determined to get more from marketing—and to measure the results. This calls for more-thoughtful strategies, more-decisive allocation of resources, and sharper focus on execution capability. In this environment, marketers face several key challenges:

  • Aligning marketing goals with the needs, objectives, and strategies of the overall business
  • Finding the best way to incorporate trends such as new media, Web 2.0 principles, and viral/word-of-mouth concepts into marketing efforts
  • Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing activities
  • Understanding our return on marketing investment and adjusting spend accordingly
  • Specifying internal capabilities that are required to ensure best-in-class marketing execution

Our marketing topic experts leverage deep consumer and customer insights (across business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies) to help clients determine buying behavior, develop effective offerings across channels, and clearly present their offerings to customers. We work with companies across all industries to analyze return on marketing investments and upgrade their marketing capabilities. Within Marketing, we cover a wide range of topics:

  • Determining segment potential and behavior
  • Business model and brand/product portfolio strategy
  • Marketing strategy and objectives
  • Marketing execution, including marketing effectiveness/ROMI
  • Marketing capabilities (organization, roles, and processes)

Well-executed marketing programs drive up both revenue and profits. Eurosis Consulting works with companies to structure such programs carefully to target attractive customer segments, create the desired image and strengthen the brand. Our work focuses on brand management, including competitive positioning, and the impact that marketing mix and resource allocation have on sales and profits.



Solutions

We work with clients to prioritize their marketing spend across geographies and products, define the right messages for their customers, and find the optimal mix of vehicles among today’s wide variety of media types. Achieving exceptional return on marketing investments begins with a systematic understanding of what creates value for the customer, followed by a strategic assessment of spending priorities based on those insights across geographies, products, and brands. We bring our clients the right tools and analytic approaches to precisely measure and optimize return on marketing spend and brand investments, while helping them build the skills to sustain ongoing marketing effectiveness. We provide a tailored solution by combining various methods:

  • Creating a transparent view of marketing spend effectiveness: We help clients determine where their marketing dollars are going and how effective they are when they get there.
  • Increasing the impact of marketing spend and brand investments: We sort out where to best allocate scarce resources, based on a clear understanding of objectives and exact measurement of performance. By helping clients continually define the objectives for any given brand, we provide the clarity need to allocate funds against marketing priorities while carefully balancing immediate sales goals with investments in longer-term brand equity.
  • Implementing across the client organization: Our holistic understanding of a business allows us to collaborate effectively with our clients in optimizing marketing spend. We help find and exploit the leverage that exists across every level of the client organization and its marketing activities.
  • Institutionalize world-class capabilities: Ultimately, marketing spend effectiveness is about marketers and their capabilities, mind-sets, processes, and incentives. When it comes to getting the most from marketing investments, organizational factors are fundamental. We help clients organize for digital leadership by aligning their teams and infrastructure to best achieve exceptional return on their marketing investments.


Branding and Communication



Challenges

Whether the economy is troubled or prosperous, companies have an imperative to protect and nurture their brands, but this is a complicated task. Managers examining the role of branding today face some important challenges:

  • Specifying the key principles and organizational capabilities needed to build a successful, compelling, and valuable brand
  • Choosing the right attributes of our brand enabling us to build positioning different from our competitors’ in the long run
  • Finding the best approach to building, defining, and managing a brand architecture across multiple brands
  • Ensuring that investments in branding and communications drive value for the company
  • Setting brand management strategy to help us during tough financial times

Eurosis Consulting’s Branding and Communications topic experts work with clients to develop branding strategies that combine deep customer insights with rigorous business analytics. We ensure that brands resonate with customers and also drive value. We help our clients become leaders in the brand-driven management of the complete business system increasing the value-added potential of the brand with customers, employees, and capital markets. Within Branding and Communications, we cover a range of topics:

  • Brand positioning and identity
  • Brand strategy and driver audit
  • Brand architecture and portfolio
  • Brand equity and valuation
  • Brand organization and capabilities


Solutions

To help manage the complexity of marketing challenges and power growth through digital advantage, we bring together deep data analysis and broad experience to take the uncertainty out of the branding process and help clients create great brands. Eurosis Consulting’s branding group combines proven techniques (qualitative as well as quantitative methods) with deep experience (case studies, reference cases) to help clients create distinctive brands and lucid brand architectures. We serve the world’s leading brands in five primary areas:

Making brands matter:

We help companies define the benefits and experiences that make brands relevant, distinctive, and credible to customers, and develop strategies to differentiate brands through superior positioning relative to competitors. This frequently means repositioning established brands to better meet customer needs.

Optimizing brand portfolios and architectures:

As marketers launch many new brands and sub-brands to address their customers’ fragmented needs, we help define the roles and relationships of brand assets within a portfolio and consolidate brands to reduce complexity, overlap, and costs—all within a coherent brand architecture.

Delivering the brand promise at all touchpoints:

It is never enough to simply conceive of a great brand. The brand promise must be delivered at all places of contact with the customer, both online and off. Our holistic understanding of business and the modern multichannel environment allows us to collaborate effectively with our clients in implementing brand strategies and help specify what the organization must do to deliver a consistent brand experience to customers.

Building client capabilities:

Developing world-class branding capabilities allows clients to own their brand strategies and brands. We work to structure and design roles and role descriptions, and use training academy designs to help employees learn by doing.

Tracking and sustaining impact:

We help clients develop the metrics they need to understand where they started from (relative to peers and/or other industries) and to measure the impact of their efforts.



Sales and Channel Management



Challenges

In many ways, sales professionals are the face of the company. They are responsible for both ensuring that customers are well supported and focusing on targets in the most efficient and effective manner. However, these tasks are becoming more challenging as customers, channels, and markets evolve rapidly. Eurosis Consulting helps to drive improvements in productivity and growth beginning with an assessment of a company’s selling system. We then work with a company to develop a pragmatic, actionable implementation schedule that can reliably increase sales without disrupting a company’s current revenue streams. In building sales and channel management strategies, we help clients address below challenges:

Customer sweet spot:

If the salesforce and channels don’t know which customers are most profitable today or in the future, then any segmentation strategy is futile.

Coverage and capacity:

Technological innovations, maturing markets and more sophisticated buyers have opened a host of routes to the customer. Effective sales organizations choose deliberately, based on economics, selecting the channel that is most cost effective, yields full revenue potential and ultimately exceeds the expectations of their target customers.

Compensation and incentives design:

Most sales executives understand that compensation practices affect their companies’ ability to recruit and retain top talent. Yet surprisingly few design compensation plans to achieve growth targets.

Revenue acceleration:

Some of the biggest profit uplift potential comes from selling more—and smarter—to the current customer base. Two fast ways to boost both the top and bottom lines are to tighten up pricing discipline and to engage in focused cross-selling to the most promising segments.

Metrics and tracking:

Best-performing companies base their rewards on outcomes. Those output metrics are clear and support specific business goals. They are also externally focused and regularly benchmarked.

Tools and support:

Mobilizing back-office resources to augment field reps’ efforts is a powerful force multiplier. The best sales organizations therefore measure customer facing time and use internal support to create more.



SolutionsOur approach to sales transformations encompasses how and to whom companies sell their products and services, the channels they use, and the back-office operations that support these efforts. Where necessary and appropriate, we also help clients address specific challenges in their key account management, sales-force effectiveness, point-of-sale performance, and other relevant areas.Sales Force Effectiveness:For a company’s sales force to succeed, it must be able to target customers effectively and efficiently. This success depends on many factors, including size, organization, skills, compensation and incentive programs, and available tools and support — not to mention how salespeople approach the customer. Our sales force effectiveness service offering provides clients with the best thinking on how to understand customer requirements, design the sales and service approach, and coordinate the many processes, systems, and structures needed to support a high performing sales force.Key Account Management:Companies are growing larger and adding multiple lines of business. As they grow, they are looking to devise strategies to better and more profitably serve their best customers. Yet determining the proper size, composition, and capabilities needed to attract and retain large customers is a highly complex task. Our key account management service helps large companies play bigger and more strategically through the design and deployment of account teams that can coordinate these efforts, and cross-functional processes that enable various product lines to find better solutions for large customers.Channel Management:The need to master multi-channel sales and marketing is a growing requirement for many companies seeking to sell and service existing customers and reach new customers. Leading companies are responding by offering tailored product and service offerings designed to remain profitable and serve customers who have different requirements and buy through different channels. Our channel management service offering advises companies on how to build tailored business streams that more effectively manage their business within and across channels: identifying investment priorities and key areas of operational focus managing conflicting demands and multiple selling and supply chain requirements and bundling the right product and service offering to better and more profitably serve customers.Point-of-Sale Performance:The levels of business complexity required to deliver the right product in the right place at the right time for the right price is staggering. However, new technologies enable companies to gather the detailed information they need to keep fickle, demanding customers happy at the point of sale — whether it be physical or online. In many cases, however, companies don’t use that data effectively. The result can lead to poor decisions about supply and demand, lackluster sales, and increased tensions between key participants in the value chain. Our point-of-sale performance service offering helps clients use point-of-sale data to develop winning pricing, promotion, assortment and loyalty programs, build collaborative relationship with distribution partners, and capture benefit from a more efficient and responsive supply chain.Back-Office Efficiency:Only by focusing on the highest-value sales activities can companies most effectively drive revenue. To that end, back-office sales support activities — pre-sales activities such as collecting information about customers, order-to-cash processes, and sales data tracking and performance assessment — must remain in the back office. Our back-office efficiency service offering helps clients increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their support functions by consolidating operations, standardizing processes, and reducing costs.


Pricing



Challenges
Developing and implementing the right pricing strategy over the life cycle of product is central to long-term market success. A company’s pricing strategy must be set in the context of the broader marketplace (including customers, channels, and competitors), align with a company’s overall strategy and value proposition and provide a framework for future pricing decisions. In tough times, basic price management becomes more critical, as companies face customer-demand shifts and the threat of price wars. At the same time, customers may be more open than ever to new approaches such as bundling, value-sharing, pricing for performance, and matching price with their own economics. Managers therefore face a number of crucial challenges:
  • Adapting strategic approach to pricing in light of increased pricing volatility
  • Given declining demand, responding to or avoiding price wars
  • Spotting where the best—and fastest—opportunities are to make pricing changes and capture near-term value
  • Developing the best-in-class pricing capabilities
Our pricing service offering helps clients create value by developing market-back pricing strategies based on of the most relevant strategic, consumer, and economic considerations. Proven methodologies, targeted customer research, and advanced analytics support the strategic development process. We pull from a deep knowledge base of pricing-innovation work across various companies and industries, and we tailor our recommendations to the unique needs of each client’s business. Meanwhile, we build improvements in pricing capabilities (organization, processes, and metrics) that drive sustainable long-term value. Within Pricing, we cover a range of topics:
  • Pricing strategy
  • Pricing execution and tactics
  • Pricing capabilities and organization


Solutions
We approach pricing strategy by industry, market, product and transaction. We identify how customizing prices across markets and products can affect buying behavior and differentiate offerings. Working jointly with a client team, we identify pricing opportunities and build sustainable capabilities and repeatable processes to generate benefits today and tomorrow. We help clients achieve pricing excellence by identifying opportunities and issues that fall into three distinct but related levels:
  • Market strategy, where we look to understand how market structure, micro-economics, and conduct affect overall market price levels
  • Customer value, which creates an understanding of the pricing level and structure that best positions your offering against the competition so as to maximize the value captured in each target segment
  • Transaction level, where the exact price to charge each customer is set
We develop approaches and programs to capture those identified opportunities, and also work with clients to:
  • Craft the infrastructure—pricing processes, organizations, systems and tools, and performance management approaches necessary to support the pricing function in a business
  • Build client capabilities to sustain pricing improvement