Consumer portfolio, innovation, and design

Driving profitable growth at pace through innovation
Despite identifying it as their top lever for growth, many consumer companies find it challenging to get meaningful value from innovation. We work with clients to rethink innovation and R&D to deliver significant topline growth and margin. With the consumer at the center, we shape big ideas, drive speed and effectiveness, and build lasting capabilities to deliver exceptional value for our clients.

30-50%

Accelerated time to market

20-40%

Lowered costs to launch

25-50%

In-market success rate doubled

What we do

Portfolio and innovation strategy

We partner with clients to identify distinctive opportunity spaces, shape winning concepts, and accelerate the path to launch supported by distinctive insights, design, and business-building capabilities.

Digitally enabled innovation models

We build distinctive operating models that accelerate the path to market and increase success, using solutions to understand consumer sentiment (PinPoint, SocialSense); rapidly identify formulation and packaging opportunities (FoodIQ, PackIQ); and manage the portfolio (Project Portfolio Navigator, Koru).

Brand design to value

We build multi-year product pipelines for leading brands that include innovation, cost savings, and renovation improvements. We combine the multiple product goals of growth, cost savings and sustainability, removing silos and driving a step change in results.

Examples of our work

Accelerating time to market and improving gross margins

Revitalized growth for a global durables player, driving a comprehensive brand design-to-value program across critical global product lines, developing a product roadmap and creating clear design targets to disentangle overlapping product lines. These efforts accelerated time to market by 40% and drove a 15% improvement to gross margins.

Resetting an innovation model and portfolio

Partnered with a global CPG player to reset the innovation model and portfolio, using Innovation Quotient to diagnose the innovation system and prioritize interventions. Using our proprietary incrementality analytics, we reset the innovation portfolio to reduce the pipeline by 50%. We also redesigned the operating-to-drive innovation across business units and functions, freeing up 50% of innovation resources to reallocate to higher potential initiatives.

Redesigning an innovation strategy and operating model

Worked with a global CPG player to build a consumer obsessed growth portfolio by redesigning their innovation strategy and operating model using Innovation Quotient to identify critical interventions. Together, we built programs for critical growth capabilities including disruptive innovation, design-to-value, and marketing excellence, building a roadmap for $100M+ of annual incremental EBITDA creation.

Our people

Stacey Haas

Partner, Detroit

Stacey helps clients drive profitable growth, with a focus on portfolio strategy, innovation, and design-to-deliver above-market growth.

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Rob Loughlin

Partner, Boston

Rob helps clients drive profitable growth and innovation through brand and product portfolios, supplier management, and ecosystem development. He co-leads the firm’s global work on portfolio, innovation, design, and digitally enabled innovation.

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Jon McClain

Partner, Chicago

Jon helps clients drive profitable, above-market growth with a focus on portfolio strategy, innovation, and new business building.

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Erik Roth

Senior Partner, Stamford

Erik is one of the firm’s foremost experts on matters related to innovation, including innovation strategy, new-product development, business-model creation, open innovation, culture change, and R&D management.

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Meet more of our experts

Featured capabilities

To understand your company’s performance in innovation:

  • Innovation Quotient – Consumer-tailored innovation diagnostic that assesses company performance versus a database of 7,000+ companies based on McKinsey’s eight essentials of innovation

Identify and prioritize innovation opportunities:

  • PinPoint – Digital tool that rapidly identifies product growth drivers using web scraping, natural language processing, and advanced analytics of aggregated consumer data
  • Social Sense – At-scale social sensing tool to rapidly glean brand and product insights to guide innovation and renovation activities
  • Growth Maps – Machine-learning driven segmentation of the market used to understand current positioning and identify and prioritize growth space
  • Innovation Incrementality – Analytics leveraging point of sale data to both predict and analyze post-launch the true incrementality of an innovation
  • Project Portfolio Navigator – Proprietary advanced analytics optimization engine used to visualize and prioritize a portfolio of projects for rapid decision-making

Developing new products:

  • Culinary Excellence Center – Suite of product capabilities to support innovation and renovation for food companies including clean sheeting, teardowns, sensory testing, and “kitchen” lab space
  • FoodIQ – AI-driven ingredient reformulation that can optimize for cost and sustainability
  • PackIQ – Digital tool and database of thousands of types of packaging to automatically identify areas to improve cost structure through packaging redesign
  • R&D Excellence – Suite of tools and approaches to assess R&D organizations, build winning strategies, and optimize resource deployment
  • Innovation Garage – Approach to collaboratively build new product ideas while also shifting the client’s innovation operating model
  • Koru – Digital asset that helps de-risk and build conviction in new ventures, businesses and products by uncovering, quantifying, and prioritizing underlying assumptions

Featured insights

Article

Winning with commercial excellence: Ten lessons for consumer goods
– Our latest research shows how leading consumer goods companies build the critical commercial capabilities to out-execute the competition... and drive profitable growth.
Article

The next frontier in consumer goods: Digitally enabled innovation
– Four lessons to guide the industry’s innovation transformations.
Interview

High-stakes innovation: An interview with a cultivated-meat pioneer
– Cultivated meat is meat—but is created by a process so different from conventional meat, it has revolutionary potential,... says Didier Toubia, cofounder and CEO of cultivated-meat start-up Aleph Farms.

Keep exploring

Consumer Packaged Goods
Learn how our consultants and experts help consumer-packaged-goods clients use customer insights to increase their sales.

Growth & Innovation
We help companies to build their businesses by identifying granular growth opportunities and to improve their performance through... innovation in products, services, processes, and business models.

Strategy & Corporate Finance
Our global team of consultants help companies around the world identify, develop, and implement winning strategies, offering support... and capability building at every stage of the strategic journey and provide independent, strategic advice on finance and value creation. We work with clients on topics such as valuation, transaction support, capital markets, treasury, financial analysis and modeling, and strengthening the finance function.

Accelerating Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
We’ve always been big believers in the growth potential of our clients. Today, we’re privileged to work with organizations... that are on a new growth journey, one that pursues sustainability, inclusion, and economic growth, all at the same time

Connect with our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice

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