We help clients set comprehensive digital strategies and marketing approaches that unlock the full potential of digital media.
We partner with consumer goods companies to embrace the opportunities afforded by new platforms, rethink the consumer engagement model, and improve marketing and sales performance. We combine McKinsey's expertise in strategy, marketing, and organization with leading-edge digital capabilities across the entire consumer packaged goods (CPG) business system.
What we do
Our teams support CPG companies in their efforts to derive competitive advantage and sustainable value from the digital revolution. We help our clients achieve these goals in three core areas:
Digital marketing
Digital technology is fundamentally changing the relationship between brands and consumers. It brings unprecedented scale to interactivity, viral marketing, and consumer-generated content. Bridging the gap between statistical science and commercial craft, we help our clients understand consumers’ decision journeys across all touch points.
We work with CPG companies to identify the key opportunities for each of their brands, and we help them deploy digital media in combination with traditional vehicles to create superior returns. To pinpoint a client’s specific digital opportunities, we leverage a set of sophisticated, yet pragmatic tools.
Applications include innovative market research, such as CDJ (consumer decision journey) analysis, to capture consumer behavior across segments and touch points, transactional analysis of clickstreams and online buzz (aided by NM Incite), and Enhanced Marketing Mix Modeling (E-MMM). To help clients measure the impact of digital media relative to traditional media on a like-for-like basis, we have created a proprietary metric called “Social Media GRPs.” Unlike most traditional marketing mix modeling approaches, our tools recognize the viral effect of social media, one of the most important digital touch points today.
Digital capabilities
We engage in proprietary research to identify the key strategic business opportunities that arise from the digital revolution for each CPG company. On this basis, we help clients understand the capabilities, processes, and organizational changes they need to reap the benefits of such developments. For instance, we monitor the evolution of the digital practices of leading CPGs continuously. Also, we help our clients run digital capability assessments and develop blueprints for e-commerce organizations that recognize the trilateral requirements of consumers, CPG companies, and retail partners.
Multichannel sales
We help our clients use digital technology to accelerate sales growth across channels. This includes direct leverage, such as the development and deployment of e-commerce and CRM platforms, as well as indirect leverage, such as approaches to influence retailers’ online category management decisions. We work with our clients to develop superior channel strategies, but also to optimize individual commercial levers. Guiding questions include: What should the role of each channel be for different categories and regions? How can multichannel retailers counter the value proposition of pure online retailers? To what extent should pricing, promotion, and assortment management be differentiated across channels? How can CPGs collaborate with retailers to improve e-category management and e-shopper marketing?
Featured capabilities
We have developed a set of dedicated tools to help CPG companies track and optimize their entire digital presence. Examples include:
- Consumer Decision Journey (CDJ) analysis to capture new, nonlinear decision journeys and the relative impact of different touch points, digital as well as traditional, on brand performance
- Enhanced Marketing Mix Modeling (E-MMM) solutions, including digital media and specific viral effects of social media, to assess short-term and long-term media impact
- The Digital Factory, an off-site training facility for capability building in the context of a real-life online wine store (situated near Munich)
- The Multichannel IT Solutions Navigator, a tool that helps clients identify the best technology to support a given multichannel strategy
- Periscope, improves return on sales through better pricing, promotions, assortment, and performance management
We partner with industry associations and leading digital players to ensure digital excellence across all geographies and topics. We update, refine, and enhance our toolkit to take advantage of new technologies and opportunities.
