Growth platforms are a company-wide tool for seizing opportunities beyond current categories and telling an inspiring growth story – to consumers, partners, and investors alike. More peanut butter or a larger share of breakfast occasions?
The global competition challenges Nordic companies to evolve. The winners succeed with more customer-oriented concepts and a clear, prioritized business focus. By looking at the business through a consumer lens, companies can see the addressable market in a new light, revealing fresh growth opportunities. This perspective can transform into a consumer-centric growth story that resonates with internal and external stakeholders.
Let’s take Kraft Heinz as an example. The company faced significant financial challenges and needed fundamental changes to turn the business around. The solution? Making consumers the driving force behind the business. Instead of simply aiming to sell more peanut butter, Kraft Heinz sought to capture a larger share of breakfast occasions.
Growth platforms shift the focus from product categories to consumption occasions, identifying new ways to connect with consumers.
Rather than spreading resources across more than 55 categories, they streamlined their focus to six global platforms like “Taste elevation,” “Easy meals made better,” and “Real food snacking”. This shift in mindset brought a new level of focus.
Growth platforms – a strategic tool for managing growth
Growth platforms are strategic tools for driving growth from a consumer need-driven perspective. They are grounded in profoundly understanding consumer needs, future trends, market and channel dynamics, and the company's business goals.
Growth platforms reveal new opportunities by defining the addressable market, estimating its size and growth potential, and assessing the company’s accessible market—considering current market share, growth potential, feasibility, and brand fit.
Growth platforms:
- support and build a consumer-oriented culture
- discover growth opportunities beyond traditional categories, expanding the addressable market
- create a common ground and language across countries, businesses, and functions
- enable focused resource allocation, maximising impact with less effort
Knowit approach to growth platforms
At Knowit, we create growth platforms in three phases:
- We uncover future growth opportunities by
- Creating a synthesis of the insights, including a profound understanding of consumer behaviour, market and channel dynamics, trends, and forming hypothesis for the growth platforms
- Defining growth platforms and evaluating their business potential
- Ensuring clear communication across functions or businesses (e.g. a platform handbook
- We define where to play & how to win by
- Incorporating growth platforms into company business planning by developing a portfolio strategy for growth
- Determining "where to play" by identifying white spaces and prioritizing growth areas
- Defining "how to win" by establishing steps to achieve the portfolio vision and growth targets, including organic and inorganic strategies
- We accelerate through focus
- We bring growth platforms to life by incorporating them into yearly planning across the organization, including strategy, business development, category planning, innovation, and marketing
At Knowit, we’ve seen first hand how growth platforms can fundamentally transform the way companies operate. If you’re ready to broaden your view of the addressable market while focusing on achieving results, give us a call.
