The challenge
Learning to think more broadly
Historically, this multi-billion-dollar company interacted with retailers industry-wide only through its sales channels. This meant that other parts of the business had little or no direct involvement with retailers. While strong at the transactional side of the business there was not enough alignment on the agendas of all the stakeholders. They also tended to assess brand performance independent of their partners’ feedback, which meant that solutions were not always aligned.
Advantage application
Powerful performance measurement and tracking tool
Through ongoing participation in our annual voice of the customer benchmarking program, this company was able to obtain feedback on all the key attributes that traditionally go unmeasured in areas such as Business Relationship, Personnel, Category/Business Development and Supply Chain. This data was also supported by comprehensive and in-depth qualitative data to provide context on why retailers and suppliers feel the way they do and what is important to them.
The outcome
Critical insights fuel high-performance relationships
By activating against these powerful insights, this consumer products giant was able to understand their performance more broadly and deeply across multiple functional areas. This helped them to operate under a mental model that treated the company and its customers as one company, thus they were able to develop new internal processes and solutions to support their retailers and serve end consumers. Performance feedback from both parties now allows them to work together to uncover areas of opportunity and to align on mutually beneficial solutions that ultimately better serve the customer.
“This [listening and responding to retailers] allows us to take a much more of an integrated team approach to how we work with our customers. We can now build processes inside that support all of our efforts in working with our retailers and our customers. Our goal is to come up with solutions that form a greater collaboration model for the industry and that advances both our agendas, both our programs, and overall growth.”
