Cases

The Element Group was in an enviable position. After four short years since start-up, this retail bank construction firm was profitable and had recouped a portion of it's start-up costs. Leadership wanted to take the next step - achieve scale. They sought help in three areas:

1.Improved % repeat clients

2.Develop a reoccurring revenue stream.- 100% of their revenue was from capital projects.

3.Build a thought leadership voice for their brand – demonstrate capability breadth beyond construction

A thorough situation analysis along with both qualitative and quantitative studies, generated insights led to execution of the following over the following three years:

Strategy: Reposition TEG as a retail banking thought leader across high-value capabilities beyond branch design/construction –

•Customer experience - Merchandising and marketing

•Consumer insight leader

Real estate sherpa - site selection and development
Branch fulfillment – Be the low cost fulfillment partner for all customer branches

In the seven years since…

•Revenue has quadrupled

•Several large regional banks count TEG as agency of record – TEG has 100% share-of-wallet

•The annual release of key customer awareness and attitude insights has helped develop the sought idustry credibility

Giant Eagle Grocery Chain

Giant Eagle is a privately held, top 20 US grocery chain that was losing market share. The executive team, with support from McKinsey, reframed GE's strategy around three focus areas. GE would focus on being the best ("famous") for three things: Fresh foods, pharmacy and Proprietary brands.

At the time of this declaration, Proprietary brands had been a strategic after-thought. The business lacked ownership, a strategy, a budget, dedicated resiurces, consistency, focus and accountability. GE never looked at this high margin business in it's entirety - there were no financial statements let alone a brand analysis.

An outcome of the Co.'s new direction was budget and focus on building a branding capbility, a team and a strategy for this $900M portfolio of 13 brands, and 5k skus competing in 314 categories.

After extensive research and analysis, leadership approved our plan of focus and simplification - we completely overhauled own brands.

Org. responsibility consolidated to one owner with P&L accountability
Developed a strategy of focus on a short list of imperatives
- Brand consolidation - Focus on five brands (Vs. 13)
- Focus on seven over=arching strategies aligned with Corp.
- Focused resources on 28 categories - objective to be #1 brandIdentified several "hero" categories - halo of brand benefit across the brand
Innovate - develop capability for proprietary formulas and package structures
Better and better-for-you foods
Developed brand standards and a brand package architecture for consistency
Consumer led marketing
Invested behind two on-trend brands
Strategic Pricing
Promotional focus

Results:

Share of chain sales grew 1.5Pt/yr over three years +41% top-line
Improved GM 25bpt/yr
Doubled annual products launched - cut cycle -50%
Grew two new brands (Foodie & Organic) to $150MM in three yrs
Immproved th balance sheet & simplified the portfolio
- Exited 7 non-strategic brands
- Reduced sku countby 35% over three years

Goodyear Eagle, once the leader in High performance tires was losing market share both in premium, and value tiers. The Eagle product lines hadn't kept pace with Michelin. Their products had become tired and outmatched in the market.

To compound the issue, GY lacked a clear market view - use of different, and flawed segmentation models prohibited a clean evaluation. Third, while the company had great customer relationships, they were out-of-touch with high performance consumer needs/wants/attitudes.

Not surprisingly GY wasn't seeing an acceptable ROI from their R&D investment.

There were five important org. needs -

An accurate segmentation of the High Performance Tire market - drive org. alignment .
Consolidate all decentralized resources pursueing alternate agendas
Leverage segmentation and comprehensive situation analysis - alignment for GY portfolio Innvation strategy
Rank and prioritize opporunities/threats based upon probability and impact.
Codify a three year portfolio roadmap - Insure full org. alignment and support