Customer Strategy & Marketing

Applying an outside-in perspective and helping clients achieve growth are fundamental to our approach at Bain.

With our team of global experts, Bain brings depth of experience in the following areas:

• Customer insights and segmentation: We help clients understand customer needs and behaviors using our BothBrain® approach and develop actionable segmentation from the resulting insights. We help clients define the target customer or "sweet spot"—the area of distinct advantage over competitors— to inform business decisions and investment allocation.
• Product and category management: We help firms break down barriers to innovation and improve ongoing customer-led product development so their value proposition is differentiated and meets customer needs.
• Pricing: We help resolve the pricing paradox—pricing is almost always the #1 profit lever, yet it remains under-developed in most companies—by building long-term pricing capabilities and capitalizing on in-year-revenue opportunities.
• Sales and channel effectiveness: We help companies identify quick, targeted, customized solutions as well as strategic and operational improvements to boost underperforming sales organizations.
• Marketing and brand strategy: We help companies align marketing and brand strategy with overarching business objectives; ensure marketing investments are generating highest returns and reinforcing the brand positioning; and build a loyal customer base through branding that cultivates a strong, trusted image.
• Customer experience: We work with companies to develop a series of positive interactions with the customer to earn their advocacy and inform consistent delivery of experiences to drive top-line growth.
• Loyalty: We help companies nurture promoters—loyal customers who are more profitable, and who are active proponents of your business in good times and bad. For more information, please visit the Net Promoter System site.

Customer-centric businesses build a virtuous cycle we call the "customer wheel." We help companies at every stage of growth, developing custom solutions and collaborating with all levels of the organization.

We help our clients succeed by transforming three building blocks of customer-led growth—the 3D lens through which clients solve problems and identify opportunities. We work with our clients to:

• Design a customer experience that is differentiated and tailored to meet customer needs. We do this by identifying a company's most important customers and appealing to those needs by creating a value proposition that is unique.
• Deliver on the promises they make by building capabilities to optimize customer interactions at every touch point.
• Reprogram their DNA to put customers and employees first. We focus on generating near-term results and building a long-term foundation for growth and giving companies what they need to keep listening and responding to change.
  
  

  
  

  NPS® and Loyalty: We literally wrote the book on loyalty. Bain has developed proven, proprietary methods to measure the health and value of the customer relationship. We have a deep understanding of the ways that customer advocacy creates competitive advantage, producing faster organic growth at lower cost.

  Bain partner and author Fred Reichheld began his groundbreaking customer loyalty research more than 30 years ago. Since then Bain has written three books on customer loyalty and has developed the Net Promoter® Score(NPS)® methodology.NPS has been adopted by leading corporations worldwide, and Bain has supported the development and implementation of NPS at many of them. Through adoption and learning, the Net Promoter Score has morphed into a system of management. As the Net Promoter framework expands, it touches every part of a business.

  Rob Markey, Fred Reichheld’s colleague at Bain for over 20 years, joins him as coauthor of the forthcoming The Ultimate Question 2.0, publishing September 2011 (for more information, please visit the Net Promoter System site). Mr. Markey was an important reader and adviser on the first edition of the book. He leads the NPS Loyalty Forum and is the head of Bain’s Global Customer Strategy and Marketing practice.

  ® Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.