Marketing Outsourcing

The right consumer marketing talent…
right when you need it

Cultivating and retaining top-flight consumer marketing talent is highly challenging for many companies playing in the consumer products space. Marketing outsourcing allows clients immediate access to highly experienced and top-performing marketing leaders who can step in and own established brands and/or new initiatives. They play the role typically shouldered by a Director of Marketing or Chief Marketing Officer including marketing strategy, marketing plan development and marketing plan execution.

Execution may include agency management, product innovation, and packaging, promotion, pricing and advertising.

Approach

Step 1: Strategic assessment

The primary purpose of this step is to quantify the business opportunity for each stakeholder, ensuring alignment of interests. We accomplish this by conducting a comprehensive review of all insights across the 5C’s landscape including consumer, customer, category, competition and company.

One key differentiator of our approach is how we apply an integrated shopper/consumer lens to the assessment, yielding a more holistic portrait versus traditional, more siloed approaches. In this phase, we also identify any key insight gaps along with recommended studies to address them.

Step 2: Plan development

In this phase, we focus on developing both a strategic vision as well as the annual operating plan.

We start by working with the client’s leadership team to establish the 3-year strategic vision including business goals by year to ensure alignment on organization resource requirements (both financial and human). Next we overlay the portfolio roadmap to identify product or service gaps that will need to be addressed over the ensuing three years to realize the vision.

We then begin to develop the annual operating plan which consists of marketing and sales plans. The development of the marketing plans across product, packaging, pricing, and promotion is typically done in close collaboration with other agency partners and the client to ensure alignment and ease of execution.

Next these plans are translated and tailored into channel or customer-specific plans with assumed spending, volume and/or profit targets.

Finally a brand profit and loss (P&L) is developed to enable tracking of the business by month.

Step 3: Marketplace execution

The final step focuses on both enabling the organization to execute with excellence and measuring results which typically involves:

Helping the client build the necessary internal capabilities through training
Managing agency partners
Developing strategic selling presentations to be used internally or externally
Developing and maintaining a scorecard to assess business performance on a timely basis and to enable tracking and plan modification as required

Benefits to partnering

Our collaborative and comprehensive approach to marketing outsourcing enables our clients to win with world-class marketing thinking and execution, even in the face of thin internal resources.

Getting Started

To learn more about GfK Marketing Outsourcing, contact us today.