Bringing Customer Focus to a Brand Portfolio Strategy
A global technology software and services company restructured its brand portfolio to create focus on its most important customer segments, dramatically improve marketing efficiency, and accelerate growth.
Overview:
A global technology software and services company had a brand portfolio that had grown and become more complex due to a culture that rewarded “shipping the next product,” a long series of acquisitions that had not been fully integrated, and a diverse product set covering a myriad of B2C and B2B customer segments/use-cases. In particular, they had lost the ability to leverage their flagship brands to drive awareness and adoption of recent innovations. Their “smaller” brands were struggling to gain the visibility level necessary to grow and thrive. As a result, they struggled with a high degree of waste in their marketing investments, a higher cost structure, and slow overall growth rates.
Our Approach:
We teamed with the company to develop a brand portfolio strategy and to better understand both the current economics of its portfolio and its growth prospects. We helped shape a coherent customer focus that would reinvigorate the company’s flagship brands while properly positioning them for greater levels of product-service integration. We also recommended that they divest themselves of brands not aligned to this strategic focus. The actions we identified resulted in the streamlining the portfolio substantially, from over 300 “brands” (less than 50 of which had actually established any substantial levels of market traction), down to less than 10 “strategic brands” that would garner the lion’s share of their future marketing investments. The client shifted its resources and organizational focus to its key customer segments and accelerated its growth rate to twice that of the overall market in those categories in which they had formerly struggled.
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