Bridge F61: new possibilities in growth for PE-owned companies

Imagine being able to look across a range of OpCos in your portfolio and map each one on a common Business Growth scale. Or a larger business operating in multi-markets or with multi-brands where you can compare and contrast the return on your marketing investment across all these vectors.

Our Growth Mapping tool just does that.

It’s rooted in our belief that marketing has to serve the business, and if it's not driving growth it's a waste of resources, not to mention a wasted opportunity.

We think growth marketing is an idea of its time as well, as you see from the thought leadership papers we publish.

If you want to learn more about Growth Mapping your portfolio, please get in touch. It's a fast and cost-effective framework that allows meaningful comparison across a portfolio or range of brands.

Our marketing diagnostics tool grew out of too many conversations with investors, Chairs and CEOs that started like this: "I’ve been having a running conversation about our brand and marketing for some time now. I don’t think it’s working for us, but I can't put my finger on what's wrong with it."

Our marketing diagnostics battery allows you to score marketing in your business using 27 questions that we know reveal the blockers to growth-led marketing in B2B, B2C and retail.

We understand - and crucially can explain - why a poor score in any one of these domains, can hobble the growth prospects of an otherwise successful business.

Once you understand the barriers to growth in a business, you can do something about it. That might mean new personnel, reduced/refocused marketing investment or a change of agencies, all of which are areas where we can also help.

If you want to learn more about our Marketing Diagnostics service, please get in touch. We offer a guided service or a lower cost self-serve option. There are also a range of ways in which we can help you implement the changes needed.

We’ve developed a range of consultancy services that allow us to unlock growth in your business. Depending on your particular barriers to growth we can use these approaches, or sometimes in a new sector or for a particularly thorny problem we will need to find a new way of looking at the problem.

Some of our services include:

Strategy and analytics

If you are in business, the truth often lies in your data, buried somewhere deep in your data. If it’s not in your data it may be in the market, published by trade associations, governments, think tanks or even universities. Our team will sift through the data, extract the information, and then use it to build a case for action and growth. Bigger complex businesses, often with a multi-channel or omni-channel approach are especially well suited to this sort of methodology.

Research

When done well, research brings the voice of the consumer or customer into the board room. When done exceptionally well, it allows the Exec team to pivot their product, brand or message to the sunny uplands of commerciality, that uncongested place of market growth and higher margins. We believe the fabled ‘ah ha’ moments come more often from research outputs, rather than just internal rumination.

GTM Planning

The discipline of Go-To-Market was invented by Nokia in the early 2000s as a way of bringing Finnish order to the bewildering array of hardware, software, operator builds, channel distribution and marketing campaigns. First in the UK, then in Asia and then finally across the whole of the Nokia/Microsoft world, we implemented hundreds (or even, depressingly, thousands?) of GTM plans. However big or small your business, the principle is the same: create a choreographed and co-ordinated campaign, wrapped up in commercial metrics, to market at the time that best suits the business. You won’t be surprised to know it’s a happy place for some of the team.

We advise on implementation of the next generation of AI marketing technology to ensure success and avoid cultural or commercial rejection.

We are alive to the fact that the path to growth marketing can come at different speeds and scales for different businesses, according to their stage of growth or maturity. Sometimes a Fractional or Interim CMO role can be a helpful bridge as a business ramps up its capabilities. 

We have a range of CMO and Planning, Brand and Marketing Directors who can make an immediate difference to your business. Please get in touch and we can talk through if you think this is the right approach for you.