In today’s saturated markets, too many companies are trapped battling competitors for a bigger slice of the same pie, often through marginal innovation, price, or incremental marketing tweaks.

But what if the biggest opportunity lies not in fighting for space—but in creating new demand altogether?

This is how brand builders and marketers can make a difference for the business: by acting as growth drivers. It’s not enough to ask, “How do we position ourselves better than our competitors?” The better question is:

“What truly matters to our consumer that no one else is offering?”

Why Brand-Building Is Your Best Tool

Strong brands don’t just compete—they lead. They shape new categories, solve unarticulated needs, and tell compelling stories that shift consumer expectations.

Brand-building enables in three critical ways:

1. Consumer Insight: By deeply understanding your audience’s unmet needs, frustrations, and aspirations, you can uncover spaces that others haven’t yet claimed.

2. Emotional Connection: Emotional differentiation matters as much as functional superiority. Great brands don’t just offer better products—they promise better futures.

3. Strategic Narrative: Brand positioning and communication shape how a new offer is understood, increasing adoption and reducing the friction of change.

The Role of Marketing: Making New Value Visible

Creating new value is only half the equation. Marketing makes it visible. The most successful companies—think Waterdrops or Airbnb,—didn’t just launch innovative products. They marketed them differently.

Effective marketing accelerates the adoption of category-creating ideas. It reduces the perceived risk of the new and transforms the unfamiliar into the desirable.

AI is collapsing the timeline from insight to execution.

Where traditional market research and strategy development could take months, AI enables rapid, iterative exploration of:

• Consumer sentiment and unmet needs (via real-time data analysis)

• Emerging trends and whitespace opportunities (via predictive analytics)

• Messaging and creative effectiveness (via content generation and testing tools)

This doesn’t replace the need for brand strategy. It supercharges it.

AI helps marketers simulate scenarios, A/B test at scale, and uncover early signals that point toward new demand spaces.

Final Thought: Growth Requires Bold Choices

The most successful businesses I work with aren’t just optimising—they’re reimagining. They ask not just how to gain market share, but how to reshape the market. They think of their brand and customer experience as a competitive advantage.

Whether you’re a founder, marketer, or business leader: If your market feels crowded, commoditised, or stuck—it might be time to stop fighting over the old pie and start baking a new one.

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

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The Strategic Service Framework

Successful turnarounds require thoughtful choices rather than blind cost-cutting. Consider this three-step approach:

1. Identify customer priorities through research and data analysis.

2. Make strategic choice by determining where to excel and where to deliberately cut effort.

3. Reallocate resources to strengthen differentiation and operational efficiency

Real-World Application

In one business transformation I led, the company initially aimed to match premium brands across all touchpoints—an unsustainable goal given their resources. Through customer research, we discovered:

• Product design was non-negotiable for customers

• Merchandising and in-store materials could be simplified without affecting satisfaction

• Customer service costs could be reduced by using automated emails and an online help centre vs. call centre agents

By seeking to reduce merchandising costs, the team identified a new solution that didn’t compromise the perceived premium. For customer service, the self-help and automated emails were even preferred vs. speaking to an agent.

If your organisation is struggling, start by asking these key questions:

• Where should we outperform? (What do customers genuinely value?)

• Where can we strategically underperform? (What activities aren’t driving growth?)

• How do we align our operations, people, and brand around these priorities?

The Uncommon Difference

The principles of “Uncommon Service” extend beyond customer experience—they provide a blueprint for sustainable growth, enhanced profitability, and strengthened brand equity.

Making these deliberate trade-offs is what ultimately separates businesses that struggle from those that thrive in challenging environments.

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I recently worked with a client where the marketing and eCommerce teams struggled with role clarity. Team members flagged early on that unclear responsibilities were causing bottlenecks.

Why did this happen? Business targets weren’t met, and talents left, leaving roles unfilled. Instead of redefining the structure, the team divided responsibilities informally, taking on work that needed doing. As a consequence, accountability blurred, making execution slow and frustrating.

When Organisational Design Fails

This situation can also occur when businesses and organisations grow organically. Teams aren’t structured to align with business goals and strategies. The result?

• Projects took longer than necessary

• The same deliverable is worked by different teams

• Multiple people are needed even for simple tasks

• The team lacked focus and ownership

If your team is reinventing processes or is struggling with execution, it may be a sign that the organisational design may not be working.

Fixing the Problem: A Strategic Approach

To address these challenges, we mapped the existing structure, visualising who was responsible for what. Seeing the spread on paper made the problem undeniable. The team needed a structure that reflected:

1. The business goals, priorities and the business model

2. The strategies to achieve them (consumer-centricity, brand-building, innovation, eCommerce excellence, and competitive pricing & promotions)

We assessed two different ways to organise the team, benchmarking against comparable businesses. Two organisational principles stood out:

1. Consumer-Centric Structure – Aligning roles with key consumer needs or groups

2. Lifecycle-Based Structure – Structuring teams around different stages of the customer journey

Given the company’s business model and go-to-market strategy, we implemented a lifecycle-based approach.

The New Organisational Model

The team was restructured into five key roles:

1. Brand Awareness – Content & communication

2. Performance Marketing –Paid media, digital campaigns, retargeting & CRO support

3. Demand & Ecom – Ensuring strong eCommerce fundamentals and optimising the purchase experience

4. Retention & Advocacy– Strengthening customer loyalty and driving repeat purchases

5. Product Management & Innovation – Leading product launches and optimising existing product portfolio

If your team is not achieving the business goals and facing execution bottlenecks, it might be an organisational design challenge.

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

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1. Understand Your Consumer

A successful turnaround starts with deep consumer understanding. Knowing your consumer like a best friend—understanding their wants, needs, challenges, and daily lives—is foundational. For example on OLAY it was critical to understand the anti-ageing benefits women seek to tackle at 30, 40 and 50 years.

Once you understand your consumer, your company and brand’s activity system should be centred around the consumer. The business leader should direct this to enable the team.

2. Define Your Playfield

Clarity on your market, category segmentation, and competition is critical. Sometimes, this means looking beyond direct competitors to understand broader consumer choices. It will enable you to spot market opportunities and influence your brand positioning and offering. At IONIQ Skincare, we recognised that our competition wasn’t limited to body care but extended to beauty device brands.

Once you understand your playfield – take a step back and look at which geographies and channels to focus first. Look at the size of the opportunity, the trend and also effort it takes to unlock it.

3. Position Your Brand Strategically

A turnaround requires a clear brand positioning that meets identified consumer needs, builds an emotional connection and is differentiated from your competition. Your brand’s purpose should resonate with consumers and help to make a positive difference for the broader community, ideally the world. Consistency in visuals and messaging is key to recognizability and trust.

At KIKO Milano, positioning ourselves as an Italian beauty brand proved to be an accelerator.

4. Drive Growth Through Product & Innovation

Your assortment and innovation are often critical growth drivers. Assess whether your assortment meets consumer needs, aligns with market trends and is competitive. Identify hero products and glorify them. Set a clear innovation cadence whether through product launches, communication including influencers, or sales activations. For some brands, like those I’ve worked with, monthly news was necessary to deliver growth.

Ensure your product quality and promise are true and designed against consumer needs and wants.

5. Deliver Consistent Communication

You can’t generate demand without relevant and synchronized communication. Ensure a unified message across all touchpoints, connecting back to your brand. One clear, consistent message at a time is far more effective than fragmented campaigns. This message needs to be relevant to the consumer and start from a consumer insight.

For the Safeguard brand, the key was to use the white hand demo.

6. Nail Go-to-Market Strategies

Examine your pricing—both per unit and per milliliter/gram—to ensure competitiveness and alignment with product quality. Define the role of each channel and assess whether your brand has the tools to win in those spaces, including appropriate packaging, pricing, and promotions. Understand how your product is distributed and its velocity.

Promotions, while often essential to drive growth, should be profitable, brand-building, and consumer-centric. Look at the product combinations, margins, and mechanics (e.g. discount, multi-buy) with the brand’s communication strategy.

At KIKO Milano, we ran a big data analysis that led to promotions including consumer-relevant, and more profitable product combinations.

7. Structure Your Organization for Success

Turnarounds demand an effective organisational structure and cross-functional collaboration. At KIKO Milano, breaking down silos between HQ and markets was crucial.

A learning culture, change management, and the right talents are non-negotiables for success.

Final Thoughts

Every turnaround involves analysis, strategic clarity, and flawless execution. Strategic clarity also means to be clear about the 3 to 5 things that will make the biggest difference to the business.

It’s about aligning your consumer insights, market understanding, and organisational design to unlock growth opportunities. Last but not least cost-control is as essential as tacking opportunities and barriers for growth.

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Though taking a step back to understand not only what happened but why is essential to set the right focus for the year ahead. The goal? Identify growth opportunities and pinpoint barriers.

To help, I am sharing 10 spaces to review and 3 questions each to get you started:

Market

•  In which market & categories are we competing?

• How is our market space developing?

• What trends do we see surfacing?

Competition

• Who are our competitors?

• What is their brand positioning?

• How do they compete (products, pricing, promotions)?

Company

• What are our results

• What drove the results (positive & negative)?

• How do the results compare vs. the market & competitors?

Consumers

• Who is our consumer?

• What are their needs and challenges?

• Why do they buy us or not?

Brand

• What is your promise to the consumer, and is it relevant?

• How is our positioning different vs. our competition?

• How does the consumer recognise us?

Product

• What are our hero products?

• Do we have assortment gaps vs. our competition?

• Do we have product innovation that delivers against consumer needs?

Communication

• Is your communication based on a consumer insight?

• Is the communication relevant and highlighting what we uniquely have to offer?

• Are we making our brand recognisable?

Pricing

• What is our pricing strategy?

• How do consumers see our price-value-ratio?

• Are we competitive?

Promotions

• What is our promotional strategy?

• What discount mechanics work in the category and for the consumer?

• Are we competitive in terms of frequency & deal?

Distribution

• Are we distributed where our consumer is shopping?

• In which channels are we winning or not and why?

• Are we delivering against our retail partner’s strategies?

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A strong positioning means little if it’s not backed up by a delightful brand experience. The way a brand executes its service, whether online or in-store, can make the business and brand thrive but if done poorly, it can also lead to customer disappointment and harm the business.

The Role of Brand Experience in Driving Business

A well-executed brand experience builds emotional connections and creates lasting impressions. It ensures that customers not only enjoy the product or service but also feel valued by the brand.

In eCommerce, for example, brand experience manifests in the purchasing process, the unboxing moment, and the after-sales experience.

In the physical retail world, brand experience starts the moment a customer steps into the store. The way they are greeted, the atmosphere created by the layout and design, and the interaction with the staff all shape their perception of the brand. Rituals does this excellently by offering every customer a cup of tea while they browse.

Similarly, SK-II, a luxury skincare brand, delivers a sensory experience by applying their signature ingredient “Pitera” via their hero product the clear lotion on customers’ hands.

On the other hand, if a brand neglects the quality of its experience, it can directly impact its business results. A powerful example of this is Starbucks. The company was renowned for its warm, inviting “third place” environment, a space that wasn’t home or work, but a place for people to relax, talk, and enjoy their coffee. The handwritten notes on cups, the comfy chairs, and the cozy atmosphere were all elements of the Starbucks experience that made it a beloved brand.

However, over the years, Starbucks has moved away from that original promise. The once-comfy chairs have been replaced by harder wooden ones, making the space less inviting for customers to stay. The handwritten notes, sometimes including friendly compliments or pick-me-ups, have been replaced by printed orders—removing a key aspect of the brand’s famed human connection.

Brand-bulding means being clear on your client’s needs and pains, your purpose (why you exist), your benefit and how it differentiates your brand from the competition. It also requires that your stay true to your promise in your execution – the brand and sales experience your brand is offering is a critical part.

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

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Amid this uncertainty, there’s some optimism among consumers in certain regions, notably in China, the United States, and the Middle East, while Europeans remain somewhat pessimistic. What does this mean for brands and retailers in 2024?

According to our “Decoding Consumer Behavior” study, conducted with Potloc in November 2023, value for money remains paramount, followed closely by quality and durability. The trend towards health, wellbeing, and conscious consumption continues to gain traction. Supermarkets and malls will maintain their appeal, but e-commerce is poised to further expand its market share. For luxury items, consumers prioritize quality and brand reputation, often favoring multi-brand stores.

To navigate this rapidly changing landscape, adaptability and a tailored regional approach are essential. Businesses should focus on enhancing their operating models and value propositions, emphasizing quality and leveraging digital technologies for personalized offerings. Promotions and exclusive member benefits can attract more customers, particularly as over a third of respondents expect a moderate increase in spending, with younger shoppers showing particular optimism.

While 2024 may not bring seismic shifts in consumer behavior, this report provides valuable insights for brands and retailers seeking to enhance their appeal and capture opportunities in an increasingly competitive, dynamic, and uncertain retail environment.

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

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Leveraging your client’s data allows for better customer understanding, which then can enable the creation of better products, which are designed against your client’s needs and challenges, as well as relevant communication for both channels.

2. DTC brands continue to go brick-and-mortar.

In a context where performance marketing costs increase, selling via owned physical stores generates additional brand awareness, brings the brand experience to life, and allows personal interaction with the client whilst increasing physical availability.

3. Seamless customer journey blending online and offline.

Customers value a friction-free and flexible customer experience, so retail services that allow clients to buy in-store and ship to home or buy online and return in-store can make a difference.

4. Omnichannel sales assistance and customer service.

This means clients can chat with a customer service agent or sales assistant who gives advice, creates a frictionless shopping experience, and can materialize cross-sale opportunities.

5. Creating a business-to-costumer connection.

A community and interaction that reduces the distance between business and customer and or gives the customer a role for example via co-creation.

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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.