What YOU said is most important for your business!

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2022, hope your year is off to a good start!

In January we launched our second annual client survey, and we decided to ask our clients their priorities for 2022. The result is a reminder of how some of the fundamental issues preventing well designed growth strategies from achieving success are more relevant than ever. In this newsletter we will share our learnings and tips on how to address this challenge.

In “the latest” section we will summarize the highlights from the rest of the survey, including where our clients say we have added the most value in 2021. A big thank you to the many clients that took the time to answer the survey.

Finally, on Feb 22^nd we celebrated 11 years for our company, thank you all for your support over the years!

Enjoy – and as always do not hesitate to reach out to me directly with any questions.

Vittorio Raimondi

We asked our clients “Which of the following areas is your biggest priority in 2022?”

Before you read on, we invite you to respond to this question if you have not done so already.

Here are the results.

How do the results compare with your priorities? We were surprised to see “connecting strategy to brand initiatives” topped the list – shouldn’t the hardest part be to figure out the right strategy? Further still, should you not expect that any initiative put forward is the result of a deliberate strategy?

OK, full disclosure, we did expect this to be high in the list, just not such a clear winner. We have always held that the proliferation of data and the increasing complexity of the environment in which brands operate (distribution channels, communication channels, new technologies) poses a challenge to coherent strategy and marketing programs.

Yet this remains a mostly overlooked area. Much of the literature and commentaries on marketing focus on brands’ strategies, or on whether initiatives are well designed and executed. We rarely see conversations concerning how well programs connect with their overall brand strategy.

We have touched on this topic before. In a previous newsletter we introduced STRAP^TM, our framework and tool, which provides a diagnostic of how well brand plans reflect the company’s insights and strategy, and delivers a list of areas that need realignment. In that issue we also shared three simple steps to perform your own diagnostic without external help.

In this newsletter we will describe three commonalities that distinguish brand strategies that are well aligned to marketing initiatives.

1. A common dimension to articulate your big bets; for instance, is your primary focus to win certain types of consumers, or certain types of occasions? Are you trying to engage consumers or shoppers? Below is a simple summary to get you started:

Choosing your main dimension does not mean you should throw all the other dimensions away. These can still be used as an attribute to help in articulating better initiatives. For instance, if you choose a certain consumer segmentation as your primary axis, you can then use several other lenses to describe the segments. Below is an example of using a behavioral segmentation as primary dimension in the beverage category.

2. A rigorous way to quantify the dimensions; this allows you to prioritize – for instance, let’s say your strategy focuses on impacting specific consumer behaviors (as opposed to building an occasion or increasing prices) you need to have a way to quantify the value associated to winning in each one of these areas (e.g., recruitment vs frequency).

At Foresight we use the bathtub analogy, and we apply dynamic modeling to consumers’ switching to quantify the potential of each segment (see illustration below).  Other common quantification techniques include statistical modeling, fair share, and competitive or internal benchmarking. Whatever approach you choose, remember to make sure that you can track it over time!

3. A base of knowledge about how different types of initiatives impact your business; this is a fundamental area that is often overlooked – different commercial actions and business levers create different types of outcomes. IF you do not have an initial starting point, you can start by using your experience to create a hypothetical point of view. Then, over time, you can leverage measurement and tracking to build a more solid body of evidence to show which initiatives are best positioned to deliver on your strategy.

Latest at Foresight

Client survey: we are excited to share the top highlights from our annual survey!

• Net Promoter Score (how likely are you to recommend Foresight to a colleague in a similar role? 1 to 10 scale): We were thrilled to see our NPS jump to nearly 70, well above the 62 that is from industry benchmarks.
• Choice drivers (what was the primary reason you chose Foresight?): Trusted relationships and superior quality of our deliverables remain the top 2 reasons, and our flexibility became the third most important reason for working with us.
• Value delivered (Did Foresight help you achieve any of the following): Over 90% of our clients were able to extract more value from their existing data, which remains our primary value proposition across practices.
• What makes us different from competitors (rate how Foresight compares to other suppliers on the following statements): being human in our interactions and the collaborative approach we have with our clients remained our top two differentiators. We at Foresight are proud of this recognition, as “humanizing management consulting” remains one of our goals.

Employee Spotlight: This quarter we are happy to share Abby Meyer’s story! Abby is an Associate and has been with the company for two years.

Catch up on our latest work: The Latest