Corporate and business unit strategy

We have a proven track record of uncovering transformational opportunities to unlock customer demand and helping our clients activate with precision to accelerate growth

The Cambridge Group has helped companies develop demand-driven growth strategies for over 40 years. We help each client see their growth potential in a new light by taking a customer-centric approach: looking at the business through the eyes of the customer rather than looking at the customer through the eyes of the business. We have a proven track record of uncovering transformational opportunities to unlock customer demand and helping our clients activate with precision to accelerate growth. Our capabilities include defining the long-term strategy, creating an actionable growth roadmap and activating the growth strategy across execution levers.

Questions we answer:
  • What is our long-term growth vision, and how should we define success?
  • In what markets and categories should we place our bets?
  • What are the most attractive opportunities to unlock customer demand?
  • How will we create a differentiated value proposition and build competitive advantage?
  • What execution levers do we need to focus on in order to win versus the competition?
  • How should we configure our operations and organization to best execute the growth strategy?
  • How should we allocate our resources to maximize return on investment?
  • How do we manage the change process throughout the organization?
  • How should we structure growth initiatives and track performance to ensure accountability?

 

Business driver analytics and forecasting

As business performance varies over time, many of our clients struggle to determine which specific factors are driving their business trajectory, how much each factor is contributing to growth or decline and how they should harness this understanding to accelerate growth momentum.

We take a comprehensive diagnostic approach to identify the external and internal drivers of business performance and quantify the impact of each factor. To do so, we build a custom dataset encompassing a comprehensive range of potential business drivers rooted in an in-depth understanding of the client context. We apply a regression-based approach to quantify the drivers of performance and synthesize a forecast of how performance is likely to change going forward. From this analysis, we distill the strategic implications, highlighting how best to address the most critical factors constraining growth while aligning the portfolio with emerging demand tailwinds.

 

Strategic plan development

The Cambridge Group has extensive experience developing long-term strategic plans. We help our clients define their goals, determine where to play across the market landscape, and gain a clear understanding of how to win versus competitors.

We do this by taking a customer-centric, data-intensive approach in order to identify the most economically attractive pockets of unmet demand across the landscape. We develop a robust strategic fact base in order to assess each growth opportunity, sizing the economic upside as well as ability to win. We synthesize the results of this assessment to define the set of strategic initiatives most likely to maximize profitable growth, quantifying the investment and resource allocation implications for each initiative.

We often combine this customer-centric perspective with a comprehensive organizational capability assessment in order to define the set of internal performance improvement initiatives that will best enable successful execution of the growth strategy. Our comprehensive strategic growth roadmap includes clear targets, timelines, processes and accountability assignments in order to ensure disciplined strategy execution.

 

Market and category entry strategy

Our clients face challenging decisions with respect to which markets and categories to prioritize for investment. We provide clients with clarity and confidence in making this decision and develop a comprehensive market entry roadmap for the most attractive strategic growth options.

We quantify the economic upside and client right-to-win for each investment alternative, providing a clear understanding of which markets and categories represent the most attractive growth opportunities. We then dive deep on the most attractive options, developing a detailed growth roadmap laying out how to go about establishing a compelling, differentiated value proposition and profitable route to market.

 

Portfolio strategy

As companies mature, they often develop an increasingly complex portfolio of brands and product or service lines. In many cases, our clients find that it becomes increasingly challenging to establish meaningful points of difference between offerings, leading to heightened cannibalization as well as increases in operational cost and complexity.

We help our clients understand the true economic value and growth potential of each offering within the portfolio. We provide clarity into which offerings warrant an increase in investment, and which offerings should be deprioritized or culled from the portfolio. We create a customer-centric framework for managing the portfolio, providing clear guidelines for how offerings should be differentiated from one another in order to maximize incrementality while addressing the most profitable pockets of customer demand.

 

Strategy activation

Once a growth strategy has been established, the imperative shifts to embedding the strategy across the organization and activating with discipline and precision. We partner with our clients to develop actionable strategy activation plans with clear growth initiatives, corresponding organizational and capability requirements, resource allocation guidelines, performance indicators and accountability assignments for delivery against goals. We work closely across functions to create the frameworks, tools and processes required to successfully embed the strategy within the organization, while ensuring a smooth and disciplined change process.

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We'd love to help you think through your growth challenges