Consumer Products and Retail

The Consumer Products industry is going through more fundamental change now than it has in the last few decades combined. Operating models built around global power brands and scale economies delivered efficiency but created a disconnect with local consumers. Global CPG companies have lost share to both private label and smaller, niche players with a singular purpose; many became trapped in a cycle of low-growth and are now actively reshaping their portfolios and organizations to refocus on the consumer and reignite growth. 

Through our market-leading commercial expertise and experience, we help our clients develop their growth strategies, optimize commercial plans and build the organizational capabilities they need to deliver sustainable, profitable growth: 

• Growth strategy: Identify and evaluate options for growth, including organic and inorganic pathways, international expansion and consolidation opportunities, product and portfolio reconfiguration and route to market reinvention. 
• Commercial Operating Model: Define the organizational capabilities, structures and ways of working needed to deliver the growth ambition with a focus on improving connectivity to consumers, collaboration between Sales and Marketing, and synchronizing end-to-end processes like order-to-cash and integrated business planning. 
• Revenue Growth Management: Optimize commercial levers (including pack price architecture, promotions, Trade Terms and mix) in order to maximize profitable growth. 
• Route to Market Strategy: Optimize route to market, channel partners and commercial agreements to efficiently access highest growth potential geographies, consumer and shopper segments and maximize share of the profit pool. 
• Front line Enablement: Transform effectiveness of front-line salesforce through more dynamic deployment aligned with growth potential, enhanced specialism and more efficient, digitally-enabled commercial operations.  
• Commercial Transformation: Translate growth strategies and plans into a change programme the business can execute and set up a Transformation Management Office (TMO) with commercial acumen, to direct and coordinate delivery. 

To navigate turbulent market conditions and stay ahead of competitors, businesses need to consider whether their supply chain has the resilience to operate within a high-inflation environment with rising costs, where customer behaviours are ever-changing and multifaceted.  Now more than ever, it is critical for organisations to develop and nurture a supply chain that can keep up with these fluctuating market conditions and manage the increasingly complex realities of operating on a global scale. 

Whether it is managing the growing pressures of the sustainability agenda and their climate-conscious consumers, keeping up to date with the latest technologies and advances in AI, or managing how to attract and retain the best talent in a competitive marketplace, we can help. 

At Baringa, we understand the importance of getting it right which is why we help our clients to build supply chains that are: 

• Intelligent – Efficient decision-making networks that enhance human intelligence to understand the current state of a supply chain, can predict what’s coming next and prescribe a solution to manage an outcome. 
• Agile and Resilient – A supply chain that has the flexibility to quickly adapt to the evolving needs of the customer while also adjusting to the ever-changing availability of supply. 
• Responsible – A trusted and transparent community of stakeholders (customers, shareholders, suppliers) working to protect and promote the human condition and intentionally operating within planetary boundaries. 

Every business one day reaches a point where they cannot make the step change in business performance needed to unlock their full potential. When this happens, they need to move from evolving to transforming. Here is where Baringa steps in; we help our clients deliver strategic and purposeful transformational outcomes for customers, consumers, employees, shareholders, people and the planet. From talent blind-spots and lack of executionary preparedness to an imbalance in your transformation risk management, wer’e experts in detecting the tell-tale signs of when an organisation is calling for change and understanding where your organisation requires support. The team at Baringa specialises in helping you turn your strategy into reality. 

Here’s where we can help: 

• Defining your transformation strategy approach 
• Setting up and mobilising your transformation 
• Bringing in transformation capability engineers 
• Executing and building capability for your transformation 
• Coaching and aligning with leadership 
• Providing assurance capability for in-flight and historical transformations 

We work with a diverse range of consumer goods clients, from B Corp accredited firms of <100 employees, to FTSE 100. We are unashamedly geeky, and wer’e not afraid to roll up our sleeves to work alongside our clielnts to get underneath their trickiest problems, equipping them with long-term tools and processes that will set organizations up for success, long after wer’e gone.  

Some of the common challenges we have seen and helped our clients resolve are:  

Defining an actionable roadmap that meets strategic objectives  

• We co-created a supply chain planning transformation roadmap for a global consumer goods firm, helping align objectives to vision, reviewing standardisation and automation opportunities, building out a case for change and roadmap to achieve their goals  

Implementing, people-focused, process-led transformation 

• We worked with a UK retailer to embed new, efficient ways of working alongside replacing outdated legacy systems 
• We helped achieve a complex and ambitious programme plan spanning more than 10 workstreams by establishing a governance and assurance approach to drive maximum value from third party collaboration 
• Our process team led the blueprinting phase of the programme, collaborating seamlessly with our client’s third-party system integrator to deliver feasible and tailored future state design across systems and process 
• We help our clients build capability long-term – we equipped the client with a forward-looking, proactive PMO office with the know-how to manage similar programmes in the future  

Managing divestment, separation and post-merger integration end-to-end  

• We worked side-by-side with a multinational FMCG on their global legal entity restructuring from planning through to delivery 
• We helped set up the workstreams for success where clarity, planning and alignment were lacking, establishing governance and project managing multi-system, multi-partner delivery workstreams across process redesign, op model and change management   
• We equipped the client with rigorous change control process, robust risk and issue management, and scenario analysis framework 

To be tomorrow’s market leaders, consumer and retail companies must continue to innovate.  This means moving beyond optimizing existing businesses models and products lines for incremental benefit. Developing world class innovation, culture, and capability will enable companies to leapfrog the competition and drive ambitious growth agendas - leading to products, services, and business models that deliver increased value and relevance to customers and wider stakeholders, ahead of the market. 

Baringa’s unique approach leverages data and insight to prioritise key growth territories, develop and validate new innovative inventive concepts and accelerate innovation into the market. And we embed sustainability into the core of each area.

Though our cutting edge expertise we create value from strategy through to deployment, market acceleration and scale-up.  We work with clients to: 

• Achieve successful innovation in months not years; Reduce idea to shelf timelines from two to three years to six months  
• Build and embed world class innovation capabilities; Build repeatable reusable skills and knowledge in your teams to sustain business innovation once we’ve left. 
• Deliver tangible ROI; Through a more efficient and effective process delivering higher quality innovations, faster times to market with greater chances of success. 

Stores are the showrooms for both retailers and consumer products, providing a vital physical contact point between businesses and consumers in today’s economy. The way we shop has changed profoundly over the past decade, primarily driven by digital innovation and traditional bricks-and-mortar stores have had to adapt to changing consumer preferences and technological advancements to remain competitive.  

As the pace of change increases, agility across the entire store proposition is key for retailers.  

From strategic analysis to seamless execution at scale, our team brings a blend of consulting and deep industry experience across Consumer Products and Retail. We have worked with global businesses across grocery, food and drink, apparel and luxury, health and beauty, consumer electronics, home improvement, mass merchandise and department stores, and FMCG.  

We can you help:  

• Define your store vision and strategy – that is aligned to your brand values. From defining the customer service proposition, developing the store strategy and designing new, innovative store formats that are sustainable both from a cost and environmental perspective. 

We defined the UK store vision and strategy for a global food and drink service provider with over 30,000 stores, designing a new, smaller, leaner store format at a 50% lower cost base enabling regional growth from targeting new and different customer occasions at increased profitability and ROI. 

• Optimise your operations – leveraging a data-led approach to design a consistent, simple store operating model and organisation design that ensures the right people, are doing the right things, in the right place, at the right time. 

We helped a leading UK grocer, with ~1500 stores design a new, consistent store operating model; driving improvements to customer experience (increasing NPS) and reducing operational costs through identifying people, processes and technology efficiencies across their store estate.  

• Deliver best-in-class experience – that merge online with offline for a truly seamless experience for both the customer and store colleagues. 

We helped a global food & drink retailer, with ~700 stores, adapt their strategy, business models and customer engagements to COVID-19. We co-designed a new membership and loyalty proposition that significantly improving critical store metrics. 

• Embed change at scale – from focused quality assurance to end-to-end transformation planning and programme management, we have a track record of landing and embedding change at scale, with a clear framework for measuring success, building advocacy, and driving compliance to new ways of working. 

We are the long-standing delivery partner to a global jewellery retailer with ~2500 stores, providing programme and change management expertise for their largest, most complex initiatives. We also provide external quality assurance to ensure strategic priorities remain on track and to the highest quality – a ‘critical friend that brings the best out of all parties’