Industries and Clients

1. Pharmaceuticals

Despite the prospects of strong underlying growth in demand, the pharmaceutical industry faces significant challenges:

Ensuring effective clinical and commercial management of the new product development pipeline to support business growth expectations.
Ensuring patient access to products in an environment of growing concern and resistance to the costs of reimbursement on the part of both public and private payers.
Securing new product pricing that reflects commercial requirements, again in the context of growing customer resistance.
Effectively managing the expectations of both patients and healthcare providers, where patients are increasingly engaged in how their healthcare is managed, while healthcare providers increasingly seek to disengage from direct contact with the industry.

We conduct assignments for both central global operations and operating companies:

For marketing functions our work involves building marketing organization capability through planning process implementation, facilitating plan development, and the training of marketing personnel. We have developed particular expertise within global marketing organizations - focussed on marketing strategy and plan development, and reimbursement/health economics strategy.
For sales functions our work involves supporting client needs for both more effective regional/territory planning to ensure optimal healthcare provider coverage; and more sophisticated "key account" planning to ensure effective management of institutional customers (hospitals, managed care, group buying organizations, and retail pharmacy channels). This work typically involves planning process design and installation, facilitated planning assistance, and training of sales personnel.

2. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

Our clients in the consumer packaged goods industry face a number of challenges: low underlying growth in demand; an elusive consumer in a fragmented media environment; and increasingly powerful and demanding customers, to name only a few.

We have deep experience in this industry - we've been line managers of packaged goods companies as well as consultants. We also have a breadth of experience gathered from working with leading companies, but also with their retailer customers, as well as with industry associations, tackling joint industry issues and researching benchmarks and best practices.

We conduct assignments for both marketing and sales/customer management functions:

For marketing functions our work involves:

Helping clients build the capabilities of their marketing organizations through developing improved marketing planning processes, and marketing training.
Working with clients to develop their strategies and plans - this often being done using multi-functional workshops.

For sales functions our work involves:

Helping clients build more sophisticated key account functions and planning processes that can effectively manage powerful retail customers.
Building category managment capabilities to provide a strategy bridge between marketing strategies which are product-consumer focussed and the customers approach to managing categories.
Helping clients to assess the effectiveness of their trade spending and develop realistic plans for optimizing their expenditures.
Customized training programs to build key skills and support process improvements.

For industry associations, we have authored multiple benchmark studies on issues such as trade spend management, marketing and sales department costs and capabilities, and unsaleables costs.