Customer, brand and product strategy

Globally, a New Customer is emerging. One who looks and behaves very differently. They are digitally savvy, have changed values and are demanding that brands put integrity and purpose before profit.

In this new reality, brands will be expected to make a clear contribution to the environmental, social and governance agenda, with customers asking “what good does your brand bring to the world?”.

These trends will continue to influence customer decisions about where and how they purchase from your business.

Creating competitive and sustainable brand advantage with your customer, brand and product strategy will mean you need to take stock and reflect on what your business stands for.

To drive business performance, your business will need to examine its purpose in the world and how it can impact the society in a positive way. 

We help you define and shape your brand, to engage customers, people, community and shareholders aligned to your business strategy.

Using our ‘outside in’ (customer-centred) and ‘inside out’ (enterprise-centred) approach, our frameworks help you position brand purpose at the core of your corporate identity.

Deep insight and data and analytics help to identify the gap between where your brand and business are today and where they need to be tomorrow. It also builds in metrics for continual improvement.

Such seismic shifts require deep engagement with all stakeholders. We work with you to help embed your strategy in to your culture and across business units. From operations and supply chain, to marketing and sales, it can be realised across the organisation. 

Creating your brand strategy starts with getting the basics right

• Brand audit - We help you comprehensively evaluate your brand and its performance. From current perception and how its experienced across stakeholder groups, to the brand’s history, story, personality, values and position in market; we work on all these aspects. We help you ascertain how well your brand is working for you and analyse customer data, alongside conducting competitor research. We also review your brand’s performance across marketing, sales and service to gain a full picture of its health.
• Brand architecture - Brands come in several formats. Whether you manage brand networks to corporate brands, product brands to master brands, or managing new ones as part of a merger and acquisition, ensuring you minimise the complexity of them for customers is key. We help you assess the performance and potential value lifespan of your brand or sub-brands. This helps us provide clear recommendations and strategies that can simplify, rationalise or streamline portfolios to achieve optimum alignment.
• Brand messaging- At its core, your messaging should be an expression of your brand strategy and purpose. It should connect with your customers and audiences in a consistent and memorable way. Dedicated to supporting the growth of your business, we help you elevate your brand and stories through targeted messaging. We help drive innovation and creativity that can be integrated across your channels and embedded into your marketing and sales strategies.
  

We take a holistic approach to creating audience segments that goes beyond just identifying the characteristics and attributes that define and shape your most loyal and profitable customers.

Starting ‘with the end in mind’ we ensure your segments can be directly applied to marketing activation and customer engagement, linking them across your whole enterprise.

Focused on a needs-first approach, we use existing segmentation, research and analytics to help you understand your New Customer. We also connect live data sources and machine learning techniques so that they can continue to evolve. This ensures long-term relevancy.

To guide any brand strategy, you need to fully understand the financial value and strength of your brand, how it has changed over time, and how it compares to your competition.

Using our behavioural-science led approach, we measure the exact strength of your brand and assess its profile. We track its performance both historically and against competitors, to identify your brand position in market.

This delivers multiple benefits for your organisation’s lifecycle. From defining your strategic positioning and marketing, helping value merger and acquisition opportunities, to auditing return on investment, we can help improve the customer experience.

We help you align your product strategy to your brand strategy, so you can continue meeting the needs of your customers. We look across all the product dimensions to help you create portfolios that align to your environmental, social and governance agendas, and help lead you to sustainable financial improvement. From cost improvements that positively impact your bottom line, to pricing strategies that can provide competitive advantage enhancing brand value, we do it all.

Tim is deputy head of KPMG’s Customer Practice, focused on helping clients grow faster and more effectively. We do this by helping deliver the best customer, digital and employee experiences. The practice’s work spans customer analytics, experience design and technology, focused on sales, service and marketing transformation. Tim is also accountable for KPMG Nunwood, our customer experience insights business. 

Tim has 20 years’ experience running customer experience, strategy, insight and analytics programmes around the world. He has helped clients to achieve stronger business results by helping them to better understand and design their organisations around the customer. His focus is to help clients put in place more advanced growth strategies that can help to remove cost more effectively or maximise the rate of customer acquisition and/or retention. 

Tim has worked across sectors, with clients spanning major utilities to high-tech and financial services. He has run offices in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and London. 

Tim also runs KPMG’s global Customer Excellence Centre, which analyses the performance of over 3,000 brands, through the lens of customers, employees and economic results. This think tank decodes the essential components of customer and employee best practice – The Six Pillars – and helps clients apply them rapidly to their business to create growth.