Consumer Health & Wellness
-Global Skin Care Executive
Our Clients
Our Expertise
Innovation
Innovation is the lifeblood of brands, whether well-established market leaders or insurgents looking to disrupt and displace others, yet most innovation never achieves plan. At the New England Consulting Group, we bring decades of experience to every innovation process and project, improving the rate of success and increasing the NPV.
As one of many examples , we helped the number two player in consumer eye health launch a new brand that overtook the market leader to achieve #1 share and established a new benchmark in sustained growth.
“Our CEO had worked with NECG before, so when we struggled to get a winning concept for an entirely new segment, he insisted that we ask NECG to develop concepts. Even though it was out of scope, they did it in 5 days and delivered the two highest scoring concepts our division has ever had.”
-EVP Head of Strategy, multi billion-dollar healthcare company
Channel Strategy
For 25 years, Consumer Health companies focused on how to manage two emerging channels, e-commerce and club, while maintaining the established FDM and sometimes c-store business. Unfortunately, many are now trapped in a paradigm they created. NECG’s expertise in real world value analysis has helped multiple brands, large and small, recapture millions in inefficient channel costs while driving market leading growth.
As one example, NECG helped a division of the world’s leading nutrition company build a new customer strategy that saved millions in gross to net savings and identified millions more in un-tapped retailer opportunities
“We thought we had turned over every stone to improve our ROI but NECG identified 5 new avenues that each delivered 7 figure improvements.”
-SVP Sales and Marketing, nutritional/VMHS Company
Pricing
All too often, manufacturers find themselves trying to time customer and consumer sentiment around price increases rather than building a decision matrix of principles that enable decisions that help build a trend, not respond to it. For over 40 years, NECG has solved immediate and strategic pricing issues that preserve and often improve relationships with customers and consumers.
NECG created both the business case and the specific narrative for a market leading OTC brand to raise price across the board before COVID, increasing margins early and setting the stage for subsequent successful increases.
“When we started the engagement with NECG we were sure that a price increase was off the table given a very large customer’s public statements. By the time we were finished, they handed us a win-win that allowed us to take an increase pre COVID and several more as our input costs rose over the course of the pandemic.”
-Division President of a Fortune 100 Company
Advertising
In the face of media fragmentation and an increasing reliance on digital media, the biggest challenge to consumer healthcare advertising is poor foundational insights and insufficient rigor in the scrutiny of advertising briefs. NECG’s disciplined approach to building specific language around the description of target, benefit, support, and brand character result in clearer stimuli that enables higher impact in all forms of communications. This, coupled with literally thousands of examples from our partners’ collective experiences, is a winning combination.
In one specific instance, NECG recrafted the core target description by changing only 11 words (very important ones!) for a leading consumer-facing eye care company and increased intent to buy by 2x in a single week.
“We brought NECG in late in major RX-OTC switch project because we jut weren’t getting what we needed strategically or creatively from our agency. 45 days later we had two incredibly strong executions that launched the switch like a rocket.”
-CEO N. America, top 5 OTC company
Forecasting
Whether it is managing portfolio mix issues to increase revenue, trying to determine the right new item ramp, or modelling multi faceted plan changes, NECG’s ability to pull strategy through to the executional impact on a forecast is world class. Having run portfolio companies, our partners understand the interdependence of focus brands and tail brands on customer relationships and therefore consider those interdependencies when developing our inputs.
NECG recently completed a detailed forecast for a storied and complex skin care portfolio with products in e-tail, retail, and MD offices and created individual and aggregated forecasts that resulted in significant resource redeployment and dramatic improvements. One of the challenges that our approach helped to overcome was that each brand leader had previously only had a stake in maintaining/increasing only their brand’s sales.
“Your approach yielded a far more accurate picture than any of the previous work we did.”
-CMO, Fortune 100 Company
Promotion
Across segment after segment, the syndicated data points to an increasingly worrisome trend: more and more of the volume defined by both Nielsen and Circana as “base” is being subsidized by repetitious consumer and trade promotion resulting in diminishing returns for the manufacturer. NECG developed a proprietary framework that re-energizes promotion plans and builds on a brand’s channel strategy to deliver true incrementality and improved ROI.
NECG recently developed a new promotion plan for an emerging probiotic brand that grew volume nationally while decreasing reliance on the increasingly expensive drug channel, amplifying the returns and dramatically improving ROI.
“You presented your US findings and recommendations in a way that impressed our notoriously challenging sales excellence so much, they called me to ask if NECG has the same capability in other countries.”
-US GM, European OTC company
Insights
Time is right to refresh customer retention strategy
While we don’t celebrate it, there is no question that the drug channel front of store has benefitted mightily from the pandemic. Increased traffic, new shoppers, pantry loading, digital downloads and ultimately millions of vaccinations have driven revenue and placed...
Nutritional supplements likely to receive greater scrutiny
Is a regulatory reckoning just around the corner for vitamins, minerals, herbals and supplements? The more my partners and I at the New England Consulting group look at some of NIH’s (National Institutes of Health’s) recent programming and FTC’s (Federal Trade...
It’s time to step up chain drug’s skin care and beauty game
Some of the early trends in the economy, like the strong demand for new cars and the return to bars and restaurants in force are encouraging, but counterintuitive, given the still weak employment picture. But some of the over-enthusiastic pub crawlers are causing...
