Our Approach
Keeping existing brands relevant in a post-COVID world, amidst recessionary pressure, requires courage. Leaders must resist the urge to go insular and avoid the pull of fear-based decision making. It’s tempting to react to customer requests and focus on cost cutting – but these tactics will never lead to long-term success.
Over the past three years, The Garage Group has partnered with courageous brand leaders at 15+ F1000 B2B and B2C businesses to double-down on a renewed commitment to building customer-first strategies. Our solution to breaking these habits is a Jobs-Based Architecture (rooted in the tried-and-true methodology of ‘Jobs Theory’), and we have pressure-tested the application at a brand, category, and portfolio level.
Why Jobs-Based Architecture?
At most organizations, ‘Jobs Theory’ is widely accepted and broadly applied as an innovation practice to keep a pulse on unmet needs in service of driving new product development. At The Garage Group, we believe that a rigorous understanding of your customers’ Jobs to be Done should be the root of all strategy decisions – guiding base business, renovation, and commercial + product innovation.
More specifically, at the core of a strong strategy is a meaningful and customer-relevant architecture (or method of organization) that logically fuels both internal business decisions and intuitive customer navigation. Rooted in a Jobs-Based Architecture, each product, sub-brand, brand, and category within a portfolio has clear and intentional swimlanes. This clarity provides deliberate “Where to Play” choices for existing businesses, and drives focus on whitespace for new, meaningful innovation.
Proof Points
We have proven this approach across F1000 B2B and B2C businesses in Consumer Healthcare, Food & Beverage, CPG, Small Durables, and more…
- At a Brand Level – By driving clarity on Jobs to be Done, a F500 CPG megabrand repositioned their existing product lines to create clear, consumer-relevant swimlanes. This resulted in not only a strengthened core, but highlighted currently under-served Jobs to be Done as key focus areas for future innovation.
- At a Category Level – Integrating a newly acquired portfolio of brands causes internal strain on an organization. What’s more concerning, acquisition can dilute the customer experience unless external focus is made a priority. We partnered with a F1000 Food & Beverage leadership team to do just that. Six months post acquisition, we built a Jobs-based, category-level architecture to ensure that existing brands could effectively live alongside the newly acquired brands in service of a much more intentional and customer-relevant portfolio.
- At a Portfolio Level – Portfolio construction is often the result of internal decisions based on supply chain synergies, customer relationships, or aligning brands that play in similar categories. After partnering with The Garage Group to build a Jobs-Based Portfolio Architecture, a F500 Food & Beverage company clarified the role of each brand within their portfolio, and built intentional, consumer-intuitive Innovation Strategies guided by Jobs to be Done as their “Where to Play” choices.
Struggling to keep your portfolio relevant? Send us an email.
