Largely viewed as commodity businesses and facing the additional risk of limited growth and value creation potential, consumer goods providers must embrace several attributes that are critical to business performance. In fact, companies exhibiting these attributes over recent years have been able to outperform their peers.

Marketing Return on Investment

Ecomark Group helps companies in the consumer goods and services industry transform their businesses to attain high performance, increasing shareholder returns and ensuring long-term success.

Choosing the right methodology and tools to analyze where to invest marketing funds is a major issue for consumer goods and services companies.

Ecomark Group can help companies effectively redistribute their marketing investments to realize their vision of sustainable future profit growth. We offer a unique capability, comprising two key methodologies and incorporating highly innovative proprietary software, which can be used to determine a company's marketing return on investment (ROI).

Using the Ecomark Group Strategic Prioritization methodology, developed by highly skilled mathematicians and statisticians in collaboration with clients, we team with clients to identify those regions, countries and product categories with the highest growth potential, and compare the results with their current allocations. Unlike other offerings, most of which only can perform a retrospective analysis, our offering is predictive. We can recommend a strategic redistribution of clients' marketing investments in line with future profit potential.

Then the Ecomark Group Strategic Marketing Mix Analysis methodology employs econometric modeling to quantify the contribution to sales of each element of clients' marketing program. By comparing the results with those of competitors, our clients have all the information they need to make the necessary changes in their marketing investments so as to achieve high performance.

The objectivity of our analysis—we have no vested interest—is just one reason so many leading companies in several industrial categories have chosen to work with us. They recognize the breadth and depth of our global resources, our unparalleled industry experience and our extensive network of strategic alliances, which provides access to leading-edge tools and technologies. They also know that these qualities underpin a commitment to partnership for the long term.

Customer Satisfaction in the Changing Global Economy

In a world where feature and price advantages can be quickly matched if not bettered, a company's one remaining source of sustainable competitive advantage may be the quality of the customer experience it delivers. Ecomark Group's ongoing research on High Performance Business has shown that the ability to deliver a consistent, differentiated customer experience has a greater impact on customer loyalty than any other factor related to managing customer relationships.

Ecomark Group's third annual Global Customer Satisfaction Survey shines an even brighter light on the relationship between the customer experience and business performance. This research finds that, around the world, consumers now have higher expectations regarding service quality. It confirms that consumers are now more likely to switch providers due to poor service quality than for any other reason. It also reveals that service quality has become customers' foremost consideration—more influential than price—when choosing to do more business with current providers or choosing new ones.

Our survey—which sampled more than 35 consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China and France—also found that while consumers everywhere value customer service, the factors that determine whether they find a service experience satisfying or frustrating vary significantly by country—a fact with profound implications for companies seeking to drive growth by expanding into new geographies.

 

 

New Product Innovation

 

 

Efficient, profitable innovation is critical to the ability of consumer packaged goods companies to achieve high performance. On average, top-quartile performers generate 20 percent more revenue from new product introductions than companies in the bottom quartile.

In Ecomark Group's research, high-performance businesses are also distinguished because they introduce more new products than competitors, and they bring them to market five times faster. Clearly some companies have found the keys to successful innovation. And those keys are critical to achieving high performance in consumer products. Yet most companies still struggle, spending a lot of time and effort with not much to show for it.

According to a 2008 study by AMR Research on innovation in the consumer goods industry, only one in two product ideas actually move from development to launch, and only two-thirds generate the revenues anticipated once they hit the market. Clearly, not enough is known or done upfront to identify "winners." The corollary also seems to be true—development of new products or ideas that most likely will not perform is not stopped soon enough to preserve resources that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Ecomark Group's research has found companies can succeed at innovation and enjoy significant returns on their investment if they commit to the following:

    * Developing deep, actionable consumer insight through better analytics, both to uncover unmet needs in mature and emerging markets, and derive real insight from readily available commercial intelligence.

    * Adopting a more open, robust and repeatable model for customer-insight gathering, idea generation and new product development that imposes process while increasing speed-to-market and scale-to-scale.

    * Using product life cycle management and portfolio optimization strategies more rigorously to maximize top-line profitability.