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About this practice
We help clients power growth through digital advantage by focusing on three critical enablers:
- Winning the consumer decision journey
We understand how consumers make their purchase decisions at a granular level. These insights often challenge conventional wisdom and allow us to develop effective strategies to influence consumer decisions at every touch point of the complex process.
- Organizing for digital leadership
We work with our clients to build the right skills, teams, and structures to sustain growth. The goal is not to merely “add on” digital capabilities to the organization, but to help companies adapt their entire way of working to fit the new rules and opportunities of a digitizing world.
- Mastering multichannel to achieve sales excellence
We focus on how to maximize the value of each channel—as well as their seamless interplay—to drive profit and revenue.
We serve almost all of the top 20 global brands because we raise the tough questions about how to address shifts in competitive landscapes and customer needs. The answers we arrive at together lead to changes in strategy, organization, and infrastructure that create sustainable advantage. We not only collaborate with all our clients to generate actionable insights; we also help implement solutions and build the capabilities for further growth.
People
More than 450 Marketing & Sales experts in our global practice offer real-world experience and extensive knowledge in disciplines from pricing to branding to digital marketing. Our experience working across the functional boundaries of our client organizations ensures that solutions and capabilities are integrated into the client organization. Our partners include former marketing and sales executives from top global consumer products and marketing companies, PhDs in branding, social scientists, copywriters, and agency veterans. We also have 50 market specialists in the Consumer Shopper Insights service, who execute a range of research assignments, including field work for clients. Finally, with 90 locations around the world, McKinsey people know their markets firsthand.
Knowledge and tools
No other professional-services firm matches McKinsey’s investment in research and thought leadership in marketing and sales topics. Our practice provides clients and the broad marketing and sales community with timely studies, white papers, and other publications. For example, The Price Advantage, now in a second updated edition, has become a standard work for companies seeking to make pricing excellence a competitive capability.
Our knowledge-development efforts have also yielded a wide range of tools and analytic frameworks that help establish clear, fact-based perspectives. Through in-house data-gathering capabilities and partnerships, McKinsey teams can measure with precision where markets are headed and help clients make sense of their own data. These tools deliver crucial—sometimes surprising—insights. For example: In India, cell phones must be washable; in China, shampoos must work in cold water. Tools range from Consumer Decision Journey, which helps track how consumers interact with brands, to a joint venture called NM Incite, which monitors social media to capture consumer attitudes.
Network
Our network of industry experts includes more than 5,000 active senior marketing and sales executives around the world. Our regular CMSO conferences, webinars, and roundtables convene communities of peers for knowledge-sharing and debate. These forums, open to selected clients, partners, and alumni, are held at regional and local levels. Increasingly, we facilitate ongoing online discussions between gatherings to keep the conversations going. These forums not only help our clients build their own networks and learning, but help us to continually bring the latest innovative thinking and practical knowledge to our work.