We believe in strategy
We believe in analytics
In our experience, strong business performance is driven by strong leadership. The challenge facing today's leaders, however, is to navigate an incoming deluge of information to truly understand their highest-priority challenges to be addressed and opportunities to be pursued.
We work with our clients to extract and analyse data from a wide-range of sources at its most granular level – sales data, customer data, product data, market data and expenditure data. We can then provide clear, and often surprising, insights around the drivers of business performance, the factors holding the business back, and underexploited opportunities for growth.
Customer segmentation and targeted offer design
We used sales, marketing, customer relationship and usage data to create a customer-level segmentation model for a major Australian publisher.
This model drove a new plan for strategic growth including organisational transformation, targeted offer design, new product innovation, strategic pricing, sales & marketing activity, and channel strategy.
Customer-level risk segmentation
Customer-level analytics helped a major Australian energy provider understand the risk profile across different segments of its debt portfolio.
The analysis showed that most of the risk sat within a surprisingly small segment of the customer base and drove the rollout of tailored offers and processes targeted at this segment.
We believe in research
In our experience companies tend to be ‘expert’ at understanding their own approach to the market – their own offer, their own channels, their own customers and their own business models. Unfortunately, the best opportunities for growth often sit outside the scope of this expertise – customers you have never met, channels you have never used, and offers you have never considered.
We work with our clients to synthesise detailed market-wide research on competitor business models, potential customer needs and a broad range of potential offers. Only then can we be confident in identifying the most attractive market opportunities.
Tracking customer-base evolution
Comprehensive market research helped one of Australia’s leading sporting codes to understand the potential of its multicultural fan-base and to respond to some surprising insights around how this cohort was likely to evolve over time.
Benchmarking against major competitors
We helped a major Australian food manufacturer size their addressable market, and benchmark their branded offers against those of entrenched rivals, emerging innovators and ‘private label’. Our analysis uncovered previously unnoticed weaknesses in the portfolio, and drove the creation of new brand, products and channel strategies.
We believe in focus
While almost every business is familiar with the drive towards greater efficiency and lower costs, the underlying drivers of inefficiency and increasing costs are less frequently discussed. It is no wonder, that one-off initiatives to ‘pull’ cost out of an organisation are rarely sustainable (and often harm short-term business performance).
In our experience, the most persistent inefficiencies are those driven by the increasing complexity of businesses as they grow. Symptoms include exploding product ranges & customer portfolios, and proliferation of channels, systems and processes. We work with our clients (and their data) to understand the breadth of this underlying complexity and extract the ‘core’ elements that are crucial to business performance. The new business models that result tend to maximise efficiency without sacrificing growth.
Addressing operating model complexity
Detailed data analysis showed that a major Australian Agribusiness was selling ‘almost anything to almost anyone at almost any price’.
We created a clear mandate to overhaul the operating model from the ground-up, driving a significant simplification of product range and distribution network, and creating a strong platform for growth.
Refocusing to prevent commoditisation & inefficiency
Analysis of a newly acquired subsidiary of a large industrial business showed that a lack of management attention was destroying value. In particular, lack of focus on customers & pricing was driving commoditisation of the offer and back-end inefficiency.
These insights led to a divestment of the under-performing business to a new, and more focused, owner.
We believe in innovation
Almost all businesses agree on the importance of innovation in driving business growth, and there is no shortage of perspectives on the best ways to ‘bolt-on’ an innovation capability. In our experience, this approach is flawed. Rather, innovation must come from within an organisation, it must be driven by existing functions working together across organisational structures, and it must be informed by a deep understanding of existing capabilities and the market environment.
We work with our clients to build the structures which support this ‘embedded’ innovation capability – incentivising cross-functional teams, building a shared and data-driven understanding of their environment, and giving teams the mandate, tools and processes to find the ‘new’.
Dealing with disruptive change
Our work with a global publisher demonstrated the importance of innovation to maintain relevance and deliver growth through a period of disruptive digital change.
We helped to create a new business model with digital innovation 'baked-in' to every element – from products to solutions, from intermediated to direct, from organisational-silos to cross-functional teams and from in-house development to an ecosystem of partners.
Building a culture of innovation
Our work with an Australian consumer product manufacturer demonstrated that while sales of 'differentiated' products was their greatest strength, recent poor performance was driven by a diminishing pipeline of product innovation.
We helped to create a sustainable innovation process which broadened its scope beyond in-house R&D, to include innovation in design, in packaging, and in pricing throughout the entire organisation (and with partners).
Contact
Melbourne Office
Level 1, 530 Little Collins St
Melbourne, VIC, 3000
Canberra Office
Level 6, 39 London Circuit
Canberra City, ACT, 2600