The following articles were written by Booz & Company partners and other senior professionals on key topics in the consumer goods and retail sector.
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Turning “Like” to “Buy”
The market for social commerce will explode over the next five years as companies race to establish stores on social networking sites. As this growth surge happens, social commerce will take its place alongside stores, telesales, and the more traditional Web to emerge as a significant sales channel in its own right.
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Does Size Matter? Rethinking the Importance of Scale in Consumer Goods Companies
Over the last decade, the best CPG industry performers have been small companies with relatively narrow product portfolios supported by three to six differentiated capabilities. These small companies exhibit coherence, which allows them to be efficient in their activities, disciplined about their portfolios, and unmatched at the capabilities that matter most to customers.
download (PDF 370kb) > |
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The E-Commerce Imperative for Traditional Retailers: Letting Go of Old Conventions
This Perspective explores how traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers need to adjust to succeed in the e-commerce space, in particular by letting go of old conventions.
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Further Articles
| February 2010 | ||
| The Path Back to Retail Growth |
Retailers’ strategies have been misaligned with both the long-term trends and the short-term challenges they face. This misalignment, coupled with retailers’ unclear understanding of what was really driving consumer behavior and preferences, resulted in the proliferation of excess store capacity... read more > |
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| May 2009 | ||
| Shelf Centered Collaboration: From Ad-Hoc to Enterprise-Wide |
Shelf-centered collaboration," in which CPG manufacturers and retailers develop infrastructure that is more responsive to consumers' needs and more efficient for all, is gaining favor as a way to help reduce complexity and improve collaboration. The main barriers to increased collaboration... read more > |
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| April 2009 | ||
| Next-Generation Supply Chains Bigger Steps, Smaller Footprints |
Major shifts in global business conditions are radically altering input costs and risk. In response, companies must realign their supply chains, including: rethinking product formulation and packaging, restructuring the supply chain network and footprint, and realigning the role of suppliers and... read more > |
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| March 2009 | ||
| The Morning After the Night Before: U.K. Consumers in the Recession |
Consumers have already endured six months of financial crisis and now recession. It has affected their personal situations, their outlook, and their spending. Behavioural changes have affected almost all consumer goods sectors, but as the recession deepens, the easy economies have been made and the questions now become: What more will consumers do?... |
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| January 2009 | ||
| The Collaboration Game: Building Value in the Retail Supply Chain |
Retailers have historically maintained an adversarial relationship with consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, their primary suppliers. Negotiations over price, promotional support, and marketing... read more > |
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| November 2008 | ||
| Opportunities in the Crisis: Three Steps for Building a Consumer Products Powerhouse |
Some consumer companies are poised to use the economic crisis to build for the future. We see three opportunities that many companies have not yet recognized. One is to capture insight into the changing profile of consumers to tailor offers at multiple and lower price points... read more > |
