Digital
We bring together a range of sector and functional experts from across OC&C to support our clients in some of their highest priority business concerns when it comes to digital. This mix of expertise enables us to design bespoke, innovative solutions to our client's most pressing issues.
We can help you address a number of business-critical questions:
Looking to build the best plan to grow?
From start-up to scaled-up, growth strategy is one of our core capabilities. We work with digital businesses ranging from start-ups to multinational giants, often supporting them through the entirety of this journey.
Looking to acquire, divest, or IPO?
We are experts in mergers and acquisitions, supporting both Private Equity investors and corporates across all stages of the investment cycle – ranging from identifying and assessing potential investment targets, to seeking out minority or majority investors, to IPO. Our team has developed a set of proprietary tools to answer the most pertinent questions on buyers’ and sellers’ minds when it comes to digital businesses.
Looking to expand internationally?
Opportunity abounds for digital businesses – but international expansion brings with it its own set of challenges, with key questions around a number of themes such as go-to-market strategy, proposition design, and operating models. We help our clients answer these key strategic questions while ensuring pragmatic execution, and our ‘on the ground’ experience in a number of major global markets helps us to craft strategies that are genuinely bespoke.
Designing new propositions?
Whether a digital native business or an offline business finding its feet in the digital world, we help our clients understand what their target customer really wants and how to build propositions around them. We deploy industry-leading customer insights to really understand customer needs, build effective customer segmentations and design propositions and strategies around this.
Optimising your approach to sales and marketing?
We have extensive expertise in all aspects of sales and marketing – marketing analytics, salesforce effectiveness, pricing, and many more.
Rethinking customer journeys?
We work with digital businesses to understand customer needs and to ensure that they are ‘joining the dots’ across all of their routes to market in order to meet them. For many of our clients, this goes both ways – we regularly support digital businesses in building the right offline presence to support their online business.
Transforming your operating model?
The right operating model is a key enabler for executing a digital strategy.
For the digital-first, your operating model and organisation has data and digital at its heart. But scaling from start-up phase to a more structured, mature and even international business can be hard. We work with digital native companies to help them scale, putting in place the tools, operating model and organisation to take their business to the next level.
If your heartland is offline, we can help you transform your operating model to embed digital at the heart of everything you do, making sure that you are well-placed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of your customers. If you are a digital native business, we can support you in professionalising and scaling your model as you grow and expand your business.
Our experience and client base in digital spans five areas:
Our cross-sector Digital team brings together experts with the capability and experience to help businesses scale and thrive in today’s digital age.
Our Thinking
Cybersecurity’s next winners – Specialist Service Partners and MSPs/VARS
Cyber security is notoriously high-growth and acyclical so it rightly attracts significant attention from investors. However, the space is increasingly complex and rapidly changing - the goalposts keep moving for traditional business models and while some will come under pressure, others are especially well placed to win going forward.
Facing the Fashion Future
Our Brazilian and British offices have joined forces to understand the pace of the fashion industry's transformation across Latam, the US, and Europe. Our report identifies five long-term trends for apparel businesses to align to when considering scale and growth for their future.
Private Equity & Transactions 2023
A summary of 2023 Private Equity & Transactions activity by sector.
The next wave of Digital Marketplaces
In our second marketplaces annual report, we’ve conducted a major study of the world's top 250 digital marketplaces by gross merchandise value (GMV) to understand how they’ve been evolving in a post-pandemic area.
OC&C Retail Proposition Index 2023
We’re delighted to share the OC&C Retail Proposition Index, which anoints this year’s winning retailers in the eyes of consumers, and also highlights the key trends influencing UK consumer behaviour over the last year. Now in its 13th year, the report is based on speaking to over 40,000 consumers and commenting on c.700 of the world’s leading brands.
Building loyalty through paid memberships & subscriptions
Memberships and subscription products are part of a broad array of loyalty-enhancing solutions and an increasing number of travel, leisure, and hospitality businesses are launching their own. In our latest insight we delve into the current offerings in the market, examine consumer motivations, and, most importantly, shed light on what it really takes to make a loyalty programme commercially valuable.
The OC&C Global 50 2023
2022 was a year of rampant inflation – but the largest consumer goods businesses were able to drive record revenue growth by successfully passing on significant price increases. Organic volumes also remained consistent, up 0.8% from last year, but this wasn’t enough for businesses to fully escape the impact of rapidly rising input costs… Our annual OC&C Global 50 report, now in its 21st year, is an independent snapshot of the financial performance of these businesses.
Mind the Gap
Structural skill gaps faced by businesses today are driving a change in approach to learning and development (L&D), fast. This includes both what the learning goals are, as well as how that learning occurs. A number of key human capital challenges - low productivity, difficulties recruiting & retaining talent, alongside a shortening tech cycle – and a need to drive mission-critical digital transformations are putting skill development at the top of the C-suite agenda.
Generative AI in Consumer Media & Internet
We all know that Gen. AI is the most disruptive innovation since the birth of the internet – the question is, what does that mean for your business? There are an ever-growing number of ways Gen. AI can be deployed in consumer media. These can present valuable opportunities for those to deploy it to their advantage, but it can also pose an existential threat to some businesses unless they act fast.
Riding the AI wave in Travel and Accommodation
Last week, our Travel and Accommodation team hosted a breakfast discussion with industry leaders, exploring how AI is impacting the sector and how brands can capitalise on this. We’ve identified 5 key takeaways from the event to help inform businesses in their approach – both immediate and long-term - to riding the AI wave.
Winning through the squeeze
The last 12-18 months have seen global levels of inflation that we haven’t experienced for 40 years, which has required rapid and drastic actions from players across the consumer goods landscape. But as input cost deflation becomes a live and very real phenomenon in many (but not all) areas, retailer and consumer expectations continue to evolve at pace.
7 key pieces of advice for Private Equity Funds
We attended the leading Private Equity Insights conference in Warsaw, Poland in May. During the panel, Partner Bartek Krawczyk focused on sharing best practice from other private equity markets, that you might want to discuss further and test in your organizations.
Next Generation Operating Models
Brands continue to find themselves under pressure from all directions. Cost inflation, staff shortages, and ever-changing customer needs are all contributing to margin compression, which is quickly rising to unsustainable levels. While increasing consumption has offered some relief to the sector, as ESG increasingly influences consumer decisions volumes are expected to slow or stagnate.
Nurturing Customer Loyalty in China
Chinese consumers are hugely committed to loyalty programs, with two thirds of Chinese residents enrolled in 15+ programmes, and 80%+ willing to pay for an enhanced Membership product. For retailers, leisure operators and brands the benefits of a strong loyalty proposition are clear - 60% of those enrolled are more likely to recommend the company, purchase more frequently, and engage with the brand more.
The Future of the Car Dealer
Vehicle dealers are in the midst of significant change as the actions and priorities of consumers, OEMs and the government are transforming the future of vehicle distribution in all markets driving consolidation, multi-channel digitisation of consumer journeys and EV adoption.
From rags to riches
Fifteen years ago, when we heard the word ‘second-hand’, car boot sales and charity shops sprung to mind. Today, it’s come to mean something very different. The second-hand goods market (outside of China) is worth $180bn, dwarfed by the second-hand market for autos, but still as large as the GDP of Greece. This growth began with the internet, but it was the shift to online marketplaces that revolutionised the sector.