Creating Strong & Resilient Brands that sell!

What is the vision?

We want to help you drive profitable revenue growth by creating distinctive and holistic brand experiences across a brand portfolio in your targeted omni-channels. This will create strong and resilient brands that sell and are consumed thus increasing the value of the category.  Strong brands can weather storms much better and protect companies from market share loss and in the end the future of the success of the company depends on the ability to create a strong brand portfolio.  Through Integrated Business planning you can drive consumer and shopper brand loyalty by enhancing the mental and physical availability of the brands which in turn will build long lasting brands.

 Selling weak brands is hard, you may sell it into a customer but if the product does not rotate you will end up having to do a lot of promo and risk being delisted which hurts the brand even more.  Marketing can create well positioned brands but if they are not available where the consumers and shoppers are and don’t provide a consistent brand experience at every touchpoint, the brand positioning can be damaged and the brand will suffer.  Proper integrated planning will lead you to creating holistic brand experiences in all communication and omni channels so you can have strong and resilient brands. 

Here is a visualization of what Integrated Planning is all about. It is a joint process that brings together various functions in the right timing to jointly develop strategic plans that have a much higher likelihood of success than when developed in silos. Reach out to us so we can help you succeed.

Strong Brand & Category Experiences that sell

Do you wish your brand & category experiences would come to life in a consistent way in every touchpoint?

Only organizations that have mastered integrated planning can accomplish a holistic brand and category experiences at every touchpoint and our XprtSuite consultants can help you get there.

What do we mean by category?

We tend to focus on brand experiences but the brands are part of product categories. A big part of our job is not just to create distinctive brand experiences but critically important is to increase the value of the entire category. Customers do not really care about building your brand. They care about driving category value growth so they can make more profit. If through our brand propositions, innovation, price pack architecture in the right channels we can drive category value to satisfy our consumer and shopper needs, our customers will want to work closer with us.

What do we mean with “at every touchpoint”?

We mean, digital, TV, outdoor, print, e-commerce channels, off premise channels (grocery/supermarkets, mass/hypermarkets, wholesalers, convenience, discounters, drugstores, traditional trade) & on-premise channels (HORECA: Hotels, Restaurants/QSR/Bars, Cafe’s/Catering) and so on.

All For One And One For All

Joint commercial KPIs are proof that the organization is integrated. You would know because:

  • Sales cares about brand building, consumers and shoppers

  • Trade & Shopper care about consumers, channels and brand building and

  • Brand Marketing care about shoppers, channels and customers

All for one and one for all! Only organizations that are integrated in their structure, processes, ways of working, daily routines and have joint KPIs will be able to achieve this dream. We know how to help you achieve this.

Zero Based Budgeting

Usually most organizations have budgets assigned by function. Brand Marketing, Trade & Shopper and Sales are all used to getting a certain level of budget annually. At the end of the year it is a mad rush to spend what you have left or next year your budget will be less. This is a terrible way to budget but it is a very common way to budget. Everyone fights for their budget because budget is internal power. This is the wrong way to do budgeting.

The proper way of doing budgeting is by having strong integrated plans whereby the business decides where to invest the budget based on the plans that will deliver the targets with the highest likelihood of success. This is zero based budgeting. That plan will have clear targets with joint KPIs and budgets that are needed to deliver the plans. Once the budget is approved then the funds are divided by function. 3yr plans are key because once those are approved the annual plans and budgets are approved faster.

With integrated planning you get to be a truly commercial organization with zero based budgets that are destined to fund solid strategic plans to grow the business and build great and holistic brand experiences for consumers to enjoy.