An Effective Route-to-Consumer Approach for the Consumer Goods and Services Industry

High performers within the consumer goods and services industry work to ensure their value proposition is accurately delivered to the end customer.

The route-to-consumer does not consist of a single road. A complex array of internal structures provide an equally complicated set of intermediaries with critical information on pricing and promotion.

Companies within the consumer goods and services industry have worked to create compelling value propositions for their end consumers. Yet because companies rely on intermediate customers (i.e., wholesalers and distributors), prices and marketing strategies can change throughout the route-to-consumer. The issues and problems within the route-to-consumer are often overlooked until new competition or declining product revenues highlight configurations that no longer fit the company's requirements.

Accenture has created an approach that helps to define the route-to-consumer so that value propositions are more likely to stay intact from marketer to consumer. Application of this approach allows products companies to play a bigger role along the route-to-consumer, and brings them closer to the achievement of high performance through consumer satisfaction.

Accenture follows a structured and logical route-to-consumer approach that significantly raises the influence of products companies amongst intermediaries within the route-to-consumer network. This approach can be used to more effectively manage an existing route-to-consumer configuration, or to enter new regions or channels and significantly boost business performance.

Accenture's route-to-consumer approach harnesses our unparalleled abilities in sales, marketing and supply chain to drive new levels of performance in consumer goods companies. It also leverages a depth of experience from both the manufacturing and the retailing sides of the business.

We offer pioneering tools and techniques to address a range of sales and marketing needs, from channel management and sales force automation to customer profitability and sales effectiveness.

Accenture's approach involves fact-based, data-driven decision making that also values management experience and learning to enhance business performance:

• Aligning the value proposition with the internal and the external distribution network: Analysis is done to establish whether current capabilities, people, processes and structures support the value proposition of a given product.
  
  
• Understanding, through a structured approach, the complex route-to-the-customer environment: Accenture analyses the internal structures for managing the route-to-customer, and ascertains whether they are aligned with business objectives.
  
  
• Optimizing the route-to-customer configuration: Accenture ascertains whether the right people, with the right capabilities, are able to influence the right intermediaries.