Our approach

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Consumer Centric brands place their customers at the center of every discussion and every decision involving brand and business strategy.  Red Barn Consulting's formalized Discovery approach facilitates a clear roadmap to evolve brand strategy, effectively differentiate your brand from the competitive set, and improve the relevance of brand touchpoints to gain competitive market share in premium margin space.

We believe process begins with clarity of future state in mind.  Only then can an assessment of current state benchmark the starting point in a manner that clearly identifies the gap that exists between current and desired state, and inform a design phase to close that gap.  

Red Barn Consulting leads clients through this process in a collaborative manner to discover real vs perceived obstacles, and delivers a comprehensive roadmap and timeline to clarify: How much by when?  …and, How? 

Through our experience, we have found this approach to be highly effective in aligning internal teams to team goals while gaining the commitment and accountability required to deliver desired results.

While this quote sounds counterintuitive, it is not to be confused with or, in opposition of a customer service model that seeks to treat every customer as your best customer. Rather, this approach is about an intentional distortion of focus and attention to the customers that mean the most to your brand. 

Through customer segmentation we gain a behavioral understanding the customer segment(s) that represents your brand’s ideal target audience.  Only after clarifying the customer segment(s) you choose to serve, can you begin to develop a clear customer strategy to support your brand strategy.  

Strategy is about choices. Capital is a scarce resource and well developed strategy guides the allocation of this scarce resource. How much of your budget should be allocated to:

· Attracting new customers to your brand?

· Growing the value of existing customers?

· Reactivating lost / lapsed customers?

The answer to this question requires an understanding of the current & future value each of these customer segments represents to your brand.  Consequently, we believe a “Portfolio Management” competency is required within your Marketing function (may be either internal or external) to determine the allocation of resources in a manner that delivers optimized return on investment (ROI).

Through this approach, managing potential lifetime value becomes a data-driven relationship building exercise in demonstrating relevance to individual customer segments in terms of:

· Customer Life Stage

· Products & Services

· Channel Preferences

Working in collaboration with internal Marketing & Financial leaders, Red Barn Consulting develops measurement methodology to quantify the return on your brand / customer investments.  More importantly, adoption of this structure & discipline effectively supports a critical  transition of the Marketing function “from a cost center of the business – to a profit center for the business”.  

Red Barn Consulting empowers Marketing executives with structure and discipline to effectively plan, execute, measure and quantify value delivered to the growth of the business / brand.

The first 2 stages of the Continuous Learning Loop describe the adoption of data-driven marketing discipline to yield insight-driven strategy and provide foundational clarity required to begin addressing more complex challenges.  

Today, companies have more data than ever before yet, most struggle to transform data into meaningful insight to inform brand strategy.  Often, this data transformation simply requires the deployment of basic fundamental marketing measurement (ie. Did the response from a marketing campaign produce incremental sales we would have otherwise not had;  or, did response erode margin on transactions we would have otherwise had in higher margin space?).  

However, given the dynamic nature of the variables involved (Brands, Customers, Competitors, Products, Channels, etc.) we believe building meaningful brand insights requires longitudinal measurement over time.  Consequently, we believe managing customer lifetime value and brand value is about managing a journey rather than a destination.  Insight gained from analytics of each customer engagement inform and influence subsequent tactics deployed to continue supporting a goal of optimizing customer lifetime value.  

The results of structured marketing and the analytics that follow, produce customer segment-level insight that will serve to inform and evolve strategy and budget allocation. In time, these analytics reveal the trends that yield highly-predictive outcomes for planned campaigns based on the combination of segments, value levers, channels and tactics to be deployed.

Red Barn Consulting partners with Strategy and Marketing leaders to build core competencies (either internal or external) in transforming data into insight that fuels brand differentiation and accelerated growth.

Far too often, we observe the human nature of “being prisoners of our own paradigms”.   Disproportionate effort and energy is spent on an inside out view of business - (ie. “Improving how we do, what we do”).  

This approach ignores the dynamic nature of outside market influences, disruptive business models & technology and the evolving trends outside of your brand.  Consequently, we’re often asked,  “What are we not doing today that we should be, to evolve the brand, adapt to a dynamic marketplace, and capture opportunity?”)

Through structured research and vast experience with other clients, Red Barn Consulting augments the traditional “inside / out” approach discussed above, with an outside / in approach to challenge brand strategy, improve brand relevance and capture new opportunities.

In an increasingly complex and proliferated eco-system of marketing channels,  completing a customer journey mapping exercise identifies organizational gaps between brand strategy, the customer journey, and the organizational structure in place to execute against that strategy.  

Red Barn Consulting partners with cross-functional leaders within your business to coach & facilitate this process, identify both differentiating and elevating levers for your brand and incremental sources of strategic value.