News Items

In the March 2016 McKinsey Insights, they explored the importance of the customer’s end-to-end journey. For years, companies have emphasized touchpoints, messages that literally touch a customer in some way to collectively create their experience with the product, brand or business. Touchpoints are ideally mapped to the customer lifecycle.

However, in the piece From Touchpoints to Journeys: Seeing the World as Customers Do, McKinsey director Alex Singla discusses how “customer journeys include many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service.”

This experience can be long, stretching across multiple channels and — including multiple touchpoints. It can often lasting days or weeks, with more touchpoints adding more complexity to the customer relationship and experience.

The article identifies six actions that are critical to managing customer-experience journeys:

1. Step back and identify the nature of the journeys customers take—from the customer’s point of view.
2. Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the journey.
3. Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey.
4. Build an understanding of what is working and what is not.
5. Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.
6. Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.

Read more about each of these steps here.

At the core is customer satisfaction. When the journey is considered and accommodated, business and employees both report higher satisfaction.

In the process of raising capital for every early stage and start up venture, there are always two  elements present; the psychology of the deal and the reality of the deal. The latter is constant and is influenced by factors such as supply and demand, capital requirement and availability of the capital pool within the sector. However, it is the psychology of the Angel, VC or PE group that prevent the markets from behaving rationally.

Mark Suster, founder of Salesforce.com addresses this in an article on the technology sector, but it has direct application to circumstances and opportunities InterContinental Beverage Capital encounters daily in the beverage and CPG sectors and with our clients.

Read more on Both Sides of the Table: What Most People Don’t Understand about How Startups are Valued.

– Stephen Horgon, Partner

It is too late, the genie is out of the bottle! 

No longer are US or international consumers anywhere limited in their options on the style, quality, or geography historically dictated by global beer giants such as AB InBev and SAB Miller. This global merger may or may not happen. And it is really irrelevant as this is solely a move designed to enhance bottomline performance through the consolidation of existing consumption occasions and driving efficiencies.

The dramatic proliferation in the beer industry over the last 30 years has hardly been influenced by these giants at all. Rather, it has been pushed along intrepidly by undeterred, innovative brewers and the pent-up, unquenched desire for choice and variety by consumers.
This freedom cannot be bottled back up no matter the actions of AB InBev and SAB Miller.

Read the article the Impact of Craft Brewers if Global Giants Merge by Paul Gatza on Brewers Association.

-Stephen F. Horgan