Unlocking Business Growth
10 ingredients for a beautiful business turnaround
In December 2017, I started at KIKO Milano, an international mono-brand cosmetics retailer, as Brand General Manager (CMO). I was part of a newly appointed management team that found a very challenging business and financial situation.
It was a demanding journey, but after setting the foundation in 2018 and achieving a significant improvement in profitability, driving slight top- and further bottom-line growth in 2019, and managing through the pandemic in 2020, the company started to flourish again.
Being part of a business turnaround journey and unlocking business growth was a fantastic learning experience and here are my top 10 ingredients (from a CMO perspective) for a beautiful business turnaround:
Be clear, be confident, and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
People: Any of it would have been possible
Certainly not at the speed we had to move - without the passion, commitment, resilience, and can-do attitude of the organization. Never have I encountered such a passion, love for the business, and willingness to rise to the challenge.
Combining data and qualitative knowledge
Becoming data-led was a critical change in the approach. The magic happened when data analysis and learning were combined with the tacit knowledge and intuition of the organization.
Consumer understanding
Gaining clarity about who we served, allowed us to shift from being trend-led to being consumer-led. Our mantra was to know and understand the client like your best friend.
Becoming a brand
First, there was a retailer, but creating a brand positioning behind Italian Beauty, leveraging the company’s heritage, emotionally engaged the consumer and helped differentiate vs. other international players.
Winning product
New product development started by defining the business opportunity, consumer understanding and brand positioning. At the same we were leveraging bestsellers, products that the client already associated with the brand, to drive business growth with existing products.
Improving shopability
Understanding how the client is shopping helped us clarify the navigation and how to merchandise our products as well as how to communicate on shelf most effectively.
Social media as a business driver
Leveraging data and qualitative insights allowed us to improve our content so that it performed better than digital native brands. It also helped us improve our communication in other channels and shape the brand positioning.
360° Marketing
Creating insightful communication, with an idea, that was consistent across touchpoints, across the omnichannel ecosystem and markets allowed us to effectively reach our client, whilst improving ROI.
Profitable, brand-building promotions
Over time the dependence on promotions to drive sales increased, which impacted margins. Designing promotions to be top-and-bottom-line building and executing so that it worked for the brand too proved to be a winning formula.
Fostering a learning culture
Understanding what worked and didn’t work and using the learning to raise the bar going forward.
In 2022, KIKO Milano became the 3rd fastest growing beauty company globally. I am certain that under its new leadership, the company will achieve next-level results in 2023.