Growth likes focus.
Growth doesn’t come from pursuing every possible opportunity. Or from pursuing isolated ones. It needs a system for understanding how the pieces work together, and discipline for where to focus.
More users, more usage or more value can come from a variety of places. Often, the more interesting opportunities come from connecting changes in culture with unmet needs and assets the business already has. These can reveal not just where to play, but also what it takes to win across portfolio, proposition, product and experience.
At Unilever Oral Care, we gained share when we prioritized naturals and revitalizing core brands within the portfolio. When we blurred portfolio roles and brand swim lanes, we lost. For Danone, I helped shape their yogurt strategy around the cultural shifts reshaping consumption within and beyond the category.
Working through a growth question and don’t know where to start, or when to stop? Let’s chat.
Consistency and repetition aren’t even distant cousins.
The strongest brands have a clear point of view without being trapped by it. Working on Dove during its 11th consecutive year of growing household penetration taught me that brands can evolve expression and respond to culture without diluting what they stand for or losing what makes them recognisable.
Creating relevance without sacrificing coherence means navigating the tension between what should stay true, what needs to flex and where a brand has permission to go next.
From sharpening the strategic direction for Dove’s next phase of growth, to protecting Close Up’s differentiated role while exploring new benefits and formats, to leveraging the culture and sociology of ‘Joking Relationships’ in revitalizing 3 Roses, I’ve helped build brands that are both timely and timeless.
Is your brand evolving? In the right direction, or simply in a new one? Tell me where you’re wrestling with it.
No bad ideas (except ‘10x better’) but plenty unnecessary ones.
Innovation has become synonymous with novelty, ideation and the next disruptive thing. But a pipeline full of ideas isn’t necessarily a pipeline full of growth. The real test is whether an innovation gives people a meaningful new reason to choose the brand.
That might mean reaching a new audience, creating a new occasion, solving an unmet need or changing the economics of a category. Impactful innovation creates new sources of demand, rather than simply shifting the existing base.
From fortified tea to chewable, waterless, travel-friendly toothpaste tablets, to developing Unilever Oral Care’s Innovation Plan, I’ve used incremental demand to shape both innovation strategy and ideas.
If your innovation roadmap is full of ideas but short on incremental growth, I can help.
‘The’ future is a dangerous singular.
There are multiple plausible futures, shaped by different combinations of uncertainty and agency. Crystal balls aren't much use in business. Nor is a list of “megatrends” without a sense of where they might lead.
What matters less is what’s new or trending than what could become consequential, and what that might mean for the choices a business makes. Foresight is about being ready for change. It looks at drivers, trajectories, dependencies, discontinuities and second-order effects that could change consumer behaviour, rewrite the rules of a category or challenge assumptions a business is built on.
As Editor-in-Chief of Unilever’s Beauty Tuned In magazine, I found new ways to bring trends and foresight into the business. Since then, I’ve helped categories and brands translate what’s next into what to do next.
Trying to make sense of what’s emerging in and around your category? Can I help you explore where it might lead your business?
