The Company
The company is a GCC based FMCG business.
The Challenge
From the initial consultation with business leaders and key staff we embraced 5 areas that required attention.
- A lack of vision and adoption to changing market dynamics left the business stagnant and resistant to change.
- High marketing spent with low yield meant that the company was investing heavily into marketing activities that weren’t bringing profitable gains.
- A poor forecast for the short and midterm of the company was given with little opportunity for recurrent and new business.
- Low profit and growth opportunities left the business without direction.
- Low profitability within certain segments meant that the business had to be refined towards its most rewarding opportunities.
Our Approach
From the result of our consultation, we decided to focus on 4 key areas:
- efficiency initiatives
- creating a robust business and operational plan that engaged the entire workforce
- improving product relevance and targeting
- enhancing the customer journey
Efficiency Initiatives
The company was led through a cost cutting exercise that reviewed spending all areas of the business. It reviewed the spending a relative profitability of logistics, sourcing, manpower, Costs of goods/sales and marketing. By reviewing the cost and relative abilities of the functions we could start to see what needed to be refined and the expected results from these actions.
Business and Strategic Planning
With the business running stagnant, the leadership were not driven to push towards a unified goal. We embraced this by reviewing and optimising their business strategy and dismantling this ultimate goal into an operational plan. The operational plan was devised and driven by key players throughout the business, each with a target driven approach that illuminated a path to success and what that looked like to the business and the individual.
Improving Product Relevance and Targeting
We found that the business was pushing the same portfolio to numerous targets and geographies. This resulted in high operational costs in areas where the product simply wasn’t selling. By refining the targeting system and utilising the company data we could see which target areas were consuming what product. We redefined the portfolio and the offering based on its consumer needs.
Enhancing The Customer Journey
One of the biggest problems with this business is that they were not engaging the customer. The customer was led through an inefficient process ending with frustration. The customer also had little chance to interact and give feedback to the business. We introduced an omni-channel approach that allowed the customer to continually communicate with the business, and vice versa, through numerous relevant channels. This allowed a customer journey to be created and refined based on exact customer requirements and needs.
The Result
As a result of the embraced changes, the company now had lowered costs and increased margins that was providing relevant products to relevant markets, all with the customer engaged throughout. This was based upon a robust, clearly thought out, strategic and operational plan. The business saw:
- 7% savings on the logistical cost of operations by bundling the requirements and negotiation.
- 11% savings on marketing costs with a more engaged marketing team that were results targeted.
- A product portfolio that focused on delivering fast moving, profitable products to the areas that consumed them most. This resulted in a 6% increase in revenue and a lowered expenditure.
- Data driven analytics that could see the relevance and profitability of all market actions.
- Engaged, refined workforce that were competent in delivering in their modified roles towards a unified ultimate business goal. Savings on redundant workforce were used to enable company growth and drive towards their business objective.
- A data and communication driven understanding of its customers and their requirements and needs. This has continued to evolve to ensure that the customer journey leads to an incredible experience that gets to be shared with counterparts and direct circle.
- An omni-channel approach that gave its customers the opportunity to communicate with and guide the brand into one that establishes full brand loyalty.