Integrating Smart Partnering into business process: A Case Study – Alticor

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Integrating Smart Partnering into business process: A Case Study – Alticor

Case Study : Create profitable ideas through smart listening and partnering

Recently I read a case study about Alticor on Emerging-Trends Listening Posts. What got my attention was how they implemented smart listening posts with their suppliers to identify trends and profitable ideas. The more I analyzed the case study, I found the nugget: Smart Partnering.

That’s Correct!

They integrated Smart Partnering  with their top 4 suppliers to establish supplier listening posts to generate customized market observations, uncover business relevant trends and identify growth opportunities.

What a brilliant idea!

How many companies actually partner with their suppliers to implement listening posts?  Not many!

Since it was a great case study, I am summarizing the story for you.

This story contains 3 main concepts to achieve their business goal to uncover trends that helps them create profitable ideas:

1)      Creative way to implement listening

2)      Integrating smart partnering with suppliers and

3)      Organization design change (about people)

Company’s Profile : AtliKor, Consumer Products, 6.3Billion in FY2006

Situation : Alticor’s business is interrupted in 2001 by unforeseen shifts in customer and market behavior. It was resulted from the downturn in financial markets, global recession and other marketing changes. Research teams were not able to track customer and marketing shifts due to the lack of information.

Implication:  The ineffective trend monitoring were due to 3 reasons:

• Broad Predictions of future scenarios with little insight for making decisions.
• Too narrow insights which focused on specific products or regions and ignored underlying forces driving cross market changes
• Too sporadic and random trends prevented comparability across markets

Complication: Due to above reasons they could not anticipate emerging market conditions and resulted in:

• Weak market observation process – Generic reports on emerging market conditions often fail to provide actionable business relevant information.
• Adhoc Monitoring Network – No dedicated team to examine the trends at the strategic level. It was performed by the internal research team who also had daily jobs.
• Limited organization buy-in : Executives and line partners did not apply the trends to make business decisions.

 Solution: To achieve their goals, the research team leveraged supplier listening post networks to gain on-the-street access to key markets, which provided a wide view of trends at a reasonable cost.  By Smart Partnering with four trend suppliers, listening posts were implemented to create the economies of scale necessary to afford the view from the street in multiple markets.

To focus listening posts on the most predictive markets, they designated specific markets, both national and metropolitan, as leading market indicators.  In addition to the designation of lead market indicators, Alticor used a second method to increase the relevance of the market observations by establishing guardrails around the information to keep it crisp. They created 11 trend categories to ensure business relevance of the content. For example, under Demographics, listening posts are instructed to focus on trend indicators such as changes in population, consumer spending patterns, household composition, and ethnic segmentation. 

Organization of Trends

Here is an example about the opportunities <illustrative purposes only>:

Emerging Patterns

What a great way to integrate Smart Partnering into a business process to identify new opportunities for growth.

Are you integrating smart partnering into your business process?

Share your thoughts.

Tagged as: Alticor, Case Study, Creative, Ideas, Integration, Listening, Profitable, Research, smart partnering, Trend