Bridge F61: an activist consultancy fit for a new world
Let us show you our value creation levers
High impact activist consultancy is the heritage of our business. The thousands of brand and marketing interventions we have cumulatively made over many years provide the intellectual underpinning and source code for our product suite.
On a more practical level, our AI-powered diagnostic tools to shine a light on the growth blockers in a business allows for a more focused, efficient consultancy engagement. We know how to get your portfolio business growing faster because no one can diagnose the modern brand and marketing world like we do.
We run six Bridge F61 brand and marketing practices, each run by a seasoned professional. We would say there is no growth challenge that they won’t have seen before.
As you would expect they are all enthusiastic embracers of the new wave of AI technology that is sweeping through the marketing services industry.
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Audience & Insight
Practice Leader: Julian Delamain
Audience & Insight are the keystones of every successful value creation exercise. Without knowledge of the right audiences for growth - and an intelligent understanding of their needs and wants - your growth trajectory will always be stifled.
Among the common mistakes we see time and time again are a reliance on corporate myths about audiences, a failure to appreciate that early adopter audiences will almost always differ from the later majority, and 'insight' that is based in opinion, or personal experience, not fact.
Having built a hypothesis around the right audience and insight, we then use the most efficient and effective research process available to validate it. In this way, we provide a factual basis for strategic discussion, prioritisation, and decision-making.
Our audience and insight tools include:
- (AI) Diagnostics
- Opportunity analysis
- Audience segmentation
- Quantitative: polling
- Qualitative: interviews and focus groups
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Place & Price
Practice Leader: Will Harris
A poor choice when it comes to products and services are distributed and how they are priced is perhaps the single greatest point of failure we see. Put more optimistically, getting Place and Price right can have a transformational effect on value creation.
We group Place and Price together as they form the keystones of our practice leader Will’s expertise, but in truth this is quite a broad church. At one end, a full understanding of GTM and distribution channels (digital or real world) can be an enabler to media and digital media selection. The former is often about cold logic, the latter more complex, wrapped up in the dark arts of digital, influencer and social marketing.
At the other end of the spectrum, knowing where your product sits in price terms, and how much you can increase or reduce price, and what the corresponding impact on demand will be is core to this practice.
Aspects we routinely we use in this practice are:
- Distribution
- Channel management
- Media/digital media choices
- Price elasticity
- Discounting strategy
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Company Reputation
Practice Leader: Sonja Healy
Is your brand an asset or a liability? The adage Perception is reality may be old, but it has endured because for the most part, it is true. This practice is concerned with the brand and business reputation of portfolio companies.
As with all aspects of Bridge F61 work, it starts with fact-based approach… what do employees, customers, investors, stakeholders or commentators think of your business, and how can get them to re-think their opinion?
In much of the work we do, the challenge is about upsizing the reputation of a company and allowing senior decision makers to feel comfortable with new levels of spend and commitment. As a business grows, we believe the growth perception should always ahead of the reality, and much of our work is about leapfrogging one over the other.
Aspects we routinely we use in this practice are:
- GAP analysis
- Consistency multiplier
- Brand reset/relaunch/rebrand
- PR, PA and crisis comms
- Sustainability and ESG
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Marketing & Ops
Practice Leader: Maya Bhose
We’re experts in growth-enabled marketing organisation and operations. Marketing teams and spends when combined are often one of the biggest cost centres in a business. The cost of spending that resource poorly is not just as simple as a waste of money.
In many PE businesses the other scarce commodity is time and poor marketing org and ops can – in our experience - cost a business 12-18 months, time they can ill afford.
Consider the compounding effect; one of the hallmarks of poor talent is they hire people less good than themselves. In big corporations that created hollow divisions, rotten from the top down. In smaller fast-growing companies, they demand more resource, more money, keener pricing. The compounding effect of a poorly organised and operated business is indeed significant.
This practice is grounded in the real world of commercial marketers and makes recommendations based on decades of managing and running teams of people across all sorts of different business sectors. We would say that all value creation not authored or overseen by blue-blooded marketers will act as a break on growth, but in this practice team we would go further and ask how you build and optimise a marketing team if you haven’t been a front-line marketer yourself.
Aspects we routinely we use in this practice are:
Marketing diagnostics
- Talent mapping
- Marketing governance
- Whole system automation
- Skills and resourcing
- Coaching and mentoring
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AI Growth Automation
Practice Leader: Tobi Ajala
We have little doubt that today’s marketing practices will seem steam powered in as little as five years’ time. The present-day stack is one that has grown up by necessity, first the quest for ROI added layers of accountability to what was once a don’t ask, don’t tell culture.
Then as digital and SaaS products have replaced manual tasks, the culture of reporting and the transition to fact-based marketing has accelerated.
AI will go further, by removing not just the need for people to manually measure and course-correct but also generate new materials and disseminate them based on machine learning.
This presents huge opportunities for growth, but also the danger of poor technology choices as brands chase the most immediate and most eye-catching solutions, rather than the ones that will accelerate growth.
Our practice is devoted to helping clients avoid bad marketing technology choices as it is to advocate the move to AI. Our team are both expert marketers and expert technologists, something that we argue is a mandatory if a client wants to end up with AI that drives growth, not just integrates easily and looks good.
Aspects we routinely we use in this practice are:
- AI & synthetic research
- AI modelling & digital optimisation
- AI content creation
- AI automation
- AI NPD
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Technology
Practice Leader: Leslie Nakajima
In the noisy world of emerging technologies such as AI, Autonomous, Robotics, Quantum and Space, the right brand and marketing approach can provide credibility and differentiation to cut through and increase the chance your technology can be heard, while adding depth to your moat.
Bridge F61 tried and tested Private Equity methodology is borne out of our real-world assignments and provides a pathway to brand and marketing value creation.
We work with management teams and boards of any maturity and follow a robust process to create brand and marketing differentiation.
Depending on the scale of your business, our Audience & Insight and Brand Reputation practices are most likely to be relevant, and you can read more about them in our value creation page.
Our team can conceive, concept, design and launch a brand and Go-To-Market plan in a timescale that will suit your business trajectory.
The road from early-stage tech venture to international colossus is not without pitfalls and deviations.
When you choose Bridge F61 you know you are at least taking one risk off the table.
Bridge F61 consultants work across a range of situations:
New acquisitions requiring a re-imagined sales and marketing plan to ignite growth
Creating a blueprint to merge two or more companies into one, or creating a group structure
Revitalising flagging or neglected PE portfolio businesses with a 100 Day Plan
Root and branch analysis or reform of a marketing team to include skills, spend and cadence
System-wide agency and data provider reviews
GTM plans for new product or market launches
Some of our client portfolio clients
