Strategy

We work with clients to achieve sustainable performance gains by expanding markets, improving formats, building partnerships, and ensuring capital productivity.

Retail has long been a game of testing and learning: trying different things, finding out what works, and doing more of it. But as the industry matures, disciplined mid- and long-term strategic planning and focused execution are becoming indispensable for sustainable performance.

What We Do

Our teams support clients in strategic retail value creation. Depending on the challenge, solutions may include the following:

Growth and international expansion

We work with retailers to identify pockets of future growth—in new categories, new target groups, or new regional markets. This often requires adapting business models, value propositions, and format strategies to the dynamics of emerging local markets.

Format excellence

Active management of the store portfolio requires trade-off decisions: which stores should be upgraded? Should new stores be opened? Which existing stores should be closed? We help retailers allocate their overall investments while also identifying the right format, layout, assortment, and positioning for existing and new stores.

Corporate finance

In a consolidating industry, we work with retailers and holding companies to optimize their portfolio through mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. We help our clients increase overall returns through active capital productivity and cost management, and we offer advanced retail risk management tools.

Partnership models

We help retailers weigh the pros and cons of developing franchises and other partnership models. We support them in end-to-end design, including concept, operating system, franchisee/partner support, quality management, and incentive schemes with an eye to the organizational structures and skills needed for an effective partnership.

Featured Capabilities

Over the course of more than 600 client projects, we have developed tools and solutions to address retail strategy topics. For example, clients and teams make use of a suite of innovative format management tools, updated and enhanced by more than 30 dedicated experts:

Innovative format database

Updated annually, this database offers a global scan of new and innovative retail formats across categories.

Value driver database

Focused on Europe, the value driver database includes a collection of best-practice retail formats, highlighting the key success factors of winning formats from around the world.