Alexandru is a leader in McKinsey's North American Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice, and the global leader of some of our marketing work. He is also the director of research for the McKinsey Health Institute, a non-profit-generating entity within the firm that aspires to catalyze action to add a collective 45 billion years of higher-quality life for all people around the world.
Alexandru has 30 years of experience in consumer and B2B marketing. He specializes in strategic marketing, where he helps companies identify profitable market segments and serve these effectively through new value propositions and brand repositioning. He has designed and managed over 500 conjoint analyses.
His recent work includes the following:
- pricing strategy, where he covered a wide range of products and services, covering everything from drinks and durables to mobile minutes to mortgages in over 35 countries, including China, Chile, Norway, and New Zealand; in over 25 of these countries, he served telecom clients
- strategic new product or service development, where he served clients in financial services, the telecom industry, airlines professional services, and more
- branding, brand positioning and value proposition strategy, where he supported clients in financial services, credit cards, insurance, telecommunications, airlines, retailing, professional services, beverages, and others
Before joining McKinsey, Alexandru developed expertise in consumer choice, price sensitivity, brand loyalty, and physicians’ choice of drugs. Alex has published his research in reputable academic journals such as Marketing Science and the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Alexandru’s seminal academic paper, “Consumer choice behavior in online and traditional supermarkets: The effects of brand name, price, and other search attributes” (International Journal of Research in Marketing, March 2000), was the winner of the Jan-Benedict EM Steenkamp Award for Long Term Impact, which is awarded once a year to only one paper that has been deemed to have the most impact in the field of marketing science for the previous decade.
Prior to his 30-year marketing career, Alexandru worked for seven years as an electrical engineer. As a proof of his attention to detail, all the integrated circuits he designed performed to specs from the first time.