The Bridge F61 value creation levers
Our value creation levers
Borne out of our long association with the Private Equity industry, our unique value creation approach provides management teams a faster diagnosis of growth blockers in their business, and charts a costed and proven roadmap to growth.
We see both possibilities and pitfalls in the adoption of new AI-led marketing automation; our seasoned partner team are well placed to advise our clients on the role of technology across our five practice areas.
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Right Audience & Right Insight: Practice Leader, Julian Delamain
The keystone of every successful value creation exercise.
Without a surefire 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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Right Place, Right Price: Practice Leader, Will Harris
After Audience and Insight, 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 can be 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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Is your brand an asset or a liability? Practice Leader, Sonja Healy
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 & Crisis Comms
Sustainability and ESG
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Growth-enabled marketing organisation and operations: Practice Leader, Maya Bhose
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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Using AI tools to automate and grow your business: 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
Some of our client portfolio clients
