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The Future of Hospitality: 4 Key Insights for Asia’s Travel Boom

Hotel brands are embracing personalization, technology and sustainability as Asia’s travel industry reinvents itself post-pandemic. 

Tourism in Asia is going through an identity crisis. By the numbers, it all looks good, with experts predicting a complete recovery, surpassing the pre-pandemic highs. However, the typical 2025 traveler bears little resemblance to those in 2019.  

Travelers in Asia now have different expectations. They have new ideas about how to enjoy life, find entertainment and spend money. They want to protect the planet. They combine work and leisure travel in new ways and crave authentic experiences over standardized hotel chains. Those changes have pushed the hospitality sector to a pivotal moment of reinvention and adaptation.  

As tourism numbers rise, the opportunities are expanding fast. Tourism brands must shift their strategy to succeed, addressing four powerful trends. They’ll need to redefine all formats for richer personalization. Thinking beyond the hotel’s physical location, brands must offer diversified experiences from retail, cultural activities to entertainment which stand true to the hotel’s brand purpose. They’ll have to find new ways to use tech, becoming more human. And they’ll need to address eco-wary travelers’ rapidly evolving sustainability expectations. 

A Look into Asia’s Travel Boom 

Asia’s impressive tourism recovery is, in large part, driven by the reopening of China post-COVID. While domestic travel expenditure has slowed since the May holiday surge (28% growth over 2019), international travel was rebounding in full force during the golden week holiday. According to Alipay, the number of transactions made by its users in overseas markets during the first four days of the holiday (October 1-4) increased by over 60% compared to the same period in 2023. Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong SAR and Singapore emerged as the fastest-growing destinations for Chinese tourists. 

Major hotel chains saw positive financial results globally, but a decrease in their China revenue. In part, that’s due to the oversaturation of the market, with chains focusing on price, and the softening of business travel. However, it’s also due to Chinese travelers’ evolving preferences that make the hostel and B&B sector more appealing. 

India is also driving the rebound, with travel industry sources reporting that outbound travelers from India spent a record $17 billion in overseas travel, a 25% jump from the prior year. In Southeast Asia, Laos and Malaysia are up 20 percent and 17 percent, respectively, in year-over-year international travel spending.  

As outbound excursions increase, countries are sharpening their offers. Japan, where visits are already well over 2019 levels, is gearing up to attract affluent tourists to lesser-known destinations, offering opportunities for an authentic experience of culture, craftsmanship and nature as a record number of foreign travelers come to the country. 

Are you Ready for the Traveler of 2025? 

Modern guests increasingly seek more purposeful, authentic and personalized experiences, prioritizing four key areas. They want: 

Diverse and Richer Formats With Personalized Experiences  

Experiential travel and cultural immersion have eclipsed the trend of checking off destinations in record time. Asian travelers are now taking their time, seeking wellness, spas, yoga activities and retreats, valuing health and relaxation in their travel experiences.  

That has also given rise to a keen interest in hyper-localized boutiques or specialized resorts, whether focused on families, skiing, or spiritual offers.  

Songtsam has tapped into this trend, with premium hotels designed to offer culturally immersive tours along the Yunnan-Tibet route. The Chinese hotel group brings together nature, outdoor adventure, meditation, village life and local countryside customs to form two “circuits” — geographically connected groups of properties that create a foundation for a multi-location trip. Over 90% of Songtsam’s employees are from local villages, guaranteeing a customer experience that reflects the area’s unique personality. 

The growing trend of traveling for concerts and festivals fits neatly into this category. Analysts estimate Taylor Swift’s recent concerts in Singapore – six shows and the only appearances in Southeast Asia – likely brought in $370 million in tourism receipts in one week. 

Cruising is also growing fast, allowing tourists to take their time and savor different regions. This year, cruise revenue in Asia is expected to reach $3.74 billion and grow at an annual rate of 20%. 

Differentiated Hotel Experiences That Connect to Retail and Entertainment Platforms 

Modern travelers don’t just come to stay – they want to do. And increasingly, retail and entertainment are part of that experience. While some inherent challenges exist for hoteliers working in mixed-use properties, when done well, guest-centric experiences create a value exchange that provides meaningful differentiation. 

Aranya Resorts has become a trendy destination for aspiring young travelers precisely because it knows how to combine commerce, culture, wellness and food with hotels and residential. It offers Instagrammable views, a concert hall, a library, diverse restaurants, luxury hotels, and retail stores that sell hip lifestyle brands. 

Even without developing properties explicitly for these connections, hotel brands can create their recipe for differentiation by partnering and collaborating across the tourism ecosystem. That may include working with transportation, credit cards, retail and experience providers. Marina Bay Sands, a luxury resort in Singapore, for example, has tie-ins with MasterCard, Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourism Board. These connections allow the brand to offer collaborations like fly-and-stay deals, built around culinary festivals and a Lunar New Year dragon drone show. 

Such partnerships make it easy for even mainstream properties to develop distinctive packages with less common destinations.  

Human Experiences, with Seamlessly Integrated Technology  

Travelers demand digital excellence when traveling. It’s how they prefer to book and pay for their trips.  

Forward-thinking hotels are responding by accelerating their adoption of new technologies to tailor experiences and differentiate themselves. Ji Hotel, a mid-range hotel brand by H World International, incorporates customizable lighting, sound, temperature and IoT solutions, as well as room service and delivery robots. Digital control panels are voice-enabled and connect everything to the group’s H Rewards loyalty program app. 

Since travelers are increasingly open to using GenAI to plan their travel, hoteliers such as Marriott and IHG are beginning to incorporate GenAI technology in membership programs to suggest travel itineraries, dining options and shopping spots.  

However, many IoT and AI capabilities can come off as impersonable, especially to the more socially conscious Gen Z. 

They want digital conveniences but are also in search of human connection. The trick is using advanced tech to make customer experiences feel more human. 

Regenerative Travel That Prioritizes People, Planet, and Progress

Travelers, especially younger and more affluent, are increasingly aware of tourism’s heavy impact on the local community, culture and environment. They want to travel more sustainably and are willing to pay extra for sustainable options. They want to stay in properties committed to reducing waste, shifting away from single-use plastics, preserving cultures, and giving back to communities. 

Built on a secluded peninsula on a private island, Nam Nghi is a boutique hotel catering to diverse audiences, with pristine beaches surrounded by lush jungles. Prophet designed a new positioning for the Vietnamese destination, helping it appeal to affluent nature-conscious guests. Their guests want authentic experiences that have minimal environmental impact. Centered around the positioning “Nurtured by Nature,” we delivered designs and ideas for touchpoints ranging from in-room amenities, food and beverage, and wellness options to digital apps to link them all. 

CX Management is the Top Agenda for Hospitality C-Levels

The theme in all four of these trends, of course, is the importance of customer experience. From the smallest boutique to the largest hotel chains, it’s important to obsessively measure how well changing audiences are reacting. That requires making CX a key function, not just a supporting role, and establishing a clear guiding principle – an experience North Star – to ensure consistent, relevant and unique customer experiences. The goal is no longer customer satisfaction but customer delight. 

  • CX management is not to be treated as a supporting function, but as a core function anchored in the business and brand strategy. 
  • It needs a positioning and value framework that can and must be derived from the brand.  
  • When strongly intertwined with the R&D of travel & hospitality, CX management is decisive for identifying and driving innovations.  
  • The measurement of CX urgently needs a strong development push beyond the classic satisfaction and recommendation KPIs. 

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The travel and hospitality industry in Asia is experiencing a renaissance, driven by emerging trends in personalization, sustainability and tech innovations. As consumer expectations evolve, hotels must pivot and reinvent themselves to offer unique, immersive experiences that go beyond traditional services. By focusing on these key trends, hospitality brands can not only meet but exceed the needs of the modern traveler, creating lasting customer loyalty.  

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How the CEO at Curative Accelerates Growth by Meeting Consumers’ Needs

Unlock. Create. Execute: A conversation about uncovering growth by delivering better health outcomes.

Growth is rarely easy – specifically, growth driven Growth is rarely easy – specifically, growth driven by customer interest and market demand rather than the temporary variety driven by acquisition, cost takeout or organizational restructuring.

Because markets are moving faster than ever, we believe sustainable growth results from:

  • Unlocking compelling customer insights to inform growth strategies
  • Creating relevant, impactful growth moves
  • Executing faster and more efficiently

Through this series of interviews with healthcare leaders, we explore the driving insights, key actions and anticipated impact of their recent growth strategies.

In this edition, we sit down with Fred Turner, chief executive officer and co-founder of Curative, to learn more about his unique vision and approach to driving change in the insurance industry.

Curative is a groundbreaking healthcare services company that created and launched the first-of-its-kind employer-based health insurance plan. Founded in 2020, Curative reengineered health insurance by providing unmatched simplicity, enhanced engagement and cost transparency with a competitive monthly premium and zero additional costs. Curative is all about building the next generation of large employer health insurance – focused on preventative health and removing barriers to care.

Fred Turner is the CEO and co-founder of Curative. Under his leadership, Curative has shifted from the leading COVID-19 testing provider to an innovator in health insurance, offering plans with no copays, no deductibles and no cost-sharing for in-network care (with the completion of a baseline visit). This model has achieved a 94% member engagement rate, far surpassing industry standards. Turner’s vision is to create a healthcare system that supports holistic patient health.

What Is the Major Unlock That Informed Your Approach and Strategy for Curative?

When Curative was founded in January 2020, we initially focused on improving sepsis outcomes but quickly pivoted to supporting COVID diagnostic testing. That work exposed us to two key learnings: one, we touched every type of payer and health plan and saw cracks in the system, and two, we learned that consumers have serious fear and anxiety when it comes to healthcare expenses. That fear may prevent them from getting care, for example a COVID test, even when COVID tests are fully covered. We knew we wanted to do something that would move the needle on U.S. healthcare, something that could drive meaningful change in the system.

“Our experience during COVID made us say, the payer dynamic is a real problem with the U.S. healthcare system, and we could build a payer that can drive preventative care and better long-term outcomes.”

We saw the untapped space, where there hasn’t been innovation for decades, as the employer market, which is where 50% of Americans get their health insurance. The U.S. has run a natural experiment over the past 10 to 15 years with High Deductible Health Plans. Fifteen years ago, about 10% of plans met the American Care Act (ACA) definition of high deductible. Today, we’re closer to 60%. Did it work? The answer is a resounding no. Consumers aren’t great at price shopping, and people don’t make rational decisions, particularly when it comes to emotional subjects such as health and their finances.

“The other substantial effect when patient cost sharing goes up is the deferral of care.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research ran a study that followed a group who moved from a low deductible to a high deductible plan over three years. In the first year, you see about a 12% reduction in spending, which looks great – like we reduced healthcare spend. The problem is when you dig into what is happening, you see people putting off primary care visits, checkups and screening tests – even though in the plan design, certain preventative screening tests, like colonoscopies, were covered at $0 out-of-pocket cost. The care that gets put off is lower acuity preventative care.

“If you have a heart attack, you’re still going to go to the hospital, no matter what your deductible is. What the high deductible plan does do is prevent you from getting the checkup that might have avoided that hospitalization.”

How Did That Insight Help You to Create the Curative Platform in a Relevant, Differentiated Way?

We’re trying to approach preventative care differently in terms of the value that we assigned to it. The typical way that an insurance plan looks at loss, or medical loss right now, is every dollar spent as $1. Whether you spend $1 on preventive care or you spend $1 in the hospital, it’s still just $1. The way that we look at it is that dollar spent on a preventative visit could avoid inpatient stays, emergency room visits or specialty drug use.

“Preventative care that keeps people well is a dollar significantly better spent than a dollar on a preventable hospital stay.”

We’re committed to making an investment upfront, to getting people engaged in their care early and then seeing that payoff downstream with lower ER, hospital or specialty drug use. Most employers get stuck in this cycle of deferred care, where the population’s health is decreasing and costs continue to go up. Curative flips the script. We make it easy for people to engage upfront. The cost sharing is zero, so there are zero out-of-pocket costs, no copays and no deductibles to go and access care – as long as you engage in a preventative health visit within the first 120 days of signing up for the plan.

“If you want people to engage with care, you have to make it really simple.”

And the only way to make it simple enough that people really understand the cost to them is to make it zeros across the board. That’s the fear that any engagement in care is bad because I might get a bill for it – that’s what we have to fight. We think the only way to reset people to see a doctor if they’re sick or in a preventive manner to avoid becoming sick is to build trust that those actions won’t cost them a dime. Our philosophy, the long game, is that we will have a higher spend in the first year because people will get the care that they need. But in the second year, we’ll get back to baseline and, by the third year, we’ll actually be saving money because this population will be healthier.

How Are You Proving That Curative Can Execute Results That Employers Are Looking For?

We’re still in the process of building trust with members and employers, but the engagement piece via a preventative visit is key. We get an hour of the member’s time to do two things: one, we aim to educate them about accessing their care through a Care Navigator session. How do they make appointments? What is a deductible? What’s a copay? How do you figure out what doctors are in-network? When should you go to the ER?

“We’re demonstrating that we want them to access the care they need versus an adversarial relationship that members often have with their health plan that doesn’t want to cover what they need.”

That kicks off the relationship in a fundamentally different way and drives a higher degree of engagement. Two, members then meet with a clinician who is looking for gaps in care. If we see a pre-diabetic patient, we want to get them to a primary care physician who’s going to manage their pre-diabetes or even reverse it, rather than letting that continue to full-on type two diabetes, where, if unmanaged, could lead to major health complications that result in tremendous expense – that’s bad for the member and for the health plan. In the longer term, we expect to be able to keep rates closer to flat by managing this care over time, rather than the typical 10% increases you’re going to get from BUCA carrier every year. We’re new to the space and want to make sure that we’re here for the long term.

“It may sometimes seem like moving the boulder of the American healthcare system is impossible, but I think with a lot of dedicated, smart people chipping away at it, piece by piece, we really can make substantial change.”

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Growth has become more challenging to generate and sustain driven by customer interest and market demand. Even top performers can no longer rely on their past strategies to achieve the next phase of growth. Beyond well-known barriers like tech-driven disruption and fickle customers, less tangible factors such as lack of executive clarity and short-term thinking pose significant threats. Sustainable growth now depends on unlocking compelling customer insights, identifying impactful growth moves and executing strategies quickly and efficiently. Ready to accelerate your growth? Schedule a workshop.

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How the CEO at Northwell Direct Accelerates Growth with a Clinician-First Approach

Unlock. Create. Execute: A conversation about uncovering growth by disrupting traditional models.

Growth is rarely easy – specifically, growth driven by customer interest and market demand rather than the temporary variety driven by acquisition, cost takeout or organizational restructuring.

Because markets are moving faster than ever, we believe sustainable growth results from:

  • Unlocking compelling customer insights to inform growth strategies
  • Creating relevant, impactful growth moves
  • Executing faster and more efficiently

Through this series of interviews with healthcare leaders, we explore the driving insights, key actions and anticipated impact of their recent growth strategies.

In this edition, we sit down with Nick Stefanizzi, chief executive officer at Northwell Direct, to learn more about the company’s origin and philosophy around growing its integrated care network.

Northwell Direct is a subsidiary of Northwell Health, one of the largest healthcare providers in New York. Established in 2020, Northwell Direct offers a direct-to-employer health care network of more than 31,000 providers and customized wellness programs to support employee health. This allows employers to offer high-quality healthcare to their employees without going through traditional insurance companies. Northwell Health utilizes Northwell Direct’s provider network for its own employee health benefits, ensuring comprehensive and cost-effective care for its workforce.

Nick Stefanizzi is the CEO of Northwell Direct, where he is responsible for the strategy, operations, growth and financial performance of Northwell Health’s direct-to-employer organization. Stefanizzi has been with Northwell Health for 16 years, serving in various roles, including assistant vice president for HR innovation and organization effectiveness as well as director of management services for Northwell’s ambulatory network.

What Is the Major Unlock That Informed Your Approach and Strategy for Northwell Direct?

Northwell Health had its own insurance company (Care Connect) that was incredibly successful – but we were not prepared for risk adjustment, so that business venture shuttered in 2018. While that was challenging, what wasn’t lost was our belief that playing in that space was the right approach. At the same time, our organization started to grow. We’re the largest private employer in the state of New York, in addition to being the largest healthcare provider. Organically, we started to get inbound inquiries from employers saying, we’re having these kinds of challenges in our employee plan – can you help us figure this out as both an employer and a provider? We saw that we had an opportunity to do something different for the communities we serve. That was really the genesis of Northwell Direct. We then built a business around that concept, not only to meet employer needs but to disrupt the payer space.

“It’s our belief that a more direct relationship between those who provide the care and those who pay for the care is beneficial, and that today, payers have inserted themselves between those two entities.”

There’s still a role for the major carriers to play, but they don’t need to sit between us, and in fact, by working together with the employers and their employees, it’s our belief that we can better manage care and drive improvements in quality and outcomes.

We only work with self-funded employers in their benefit design. In New York state, that means more than 100 employees, and we don’t carry any financial risk, as we do not offer an insurance product. We’re on the hook for performance. Our focus is on delivering value, savings, efficiency and outcomes for our employers. The other thing we didn’t do was invest in building an insurance company. There are third-party administrators that have the capabilities needed to support an employer-sponsored plan, so why not partner instead of building it ourselves and going at it alone?

“We saw a business model that was ripe for disruption and employers who were hungry for support, grappling with the challenges they’ve had with their employee population and desperate to arrest a trend that had been moving in the wrong direction for over a decade.”

We saw an opportunity to build the platform differently with partners.

In Addition to Opening a New Line of Business, What Impact Did Northwell Direct Create for Your Key Audiences?

We’ve made a concerted effort to remove the traditional denials and hurdles in this space that don’t add value or drive for the member or material savings for the employer. While we can accommodate any benefit design requirements, we have examples of clients for whom, if their employees receive care within our tier one network, there are zero prior authorizations needed. And it doesn’t lead to higher costs. There is no statistical difference in unnecessary utilization or unnecessary testing.

“We take a clinical-first approach – what does the doctor believe is necessary?”

We trust that we have providers who are going to do the right thing by the patient and by the plan, and then manage the care intensely to make sure it’s as efficient as possible. It’s about administering consistently with the benefits plan but providing clinically oriented insights into how that benefit design can be enhanced to drive the right patient behaviors and the right patient choice of the highest quality, lowest-cost providers, and then wrapping the member with support that is integrated with and endorsed by the clinician. By taking a provider-oriented approach, our engagement levels are much higher. We’re able to share the care management information back with the provider so they can take a more holistic view. And lastly, what we can do locally that the national carriers can’t is get on the ground. If we have a member who is admitted, we will send a nurse care manager to their bedside to coordinate their follow-up care, their appointments and make sure they’re clear on what happens post-discharge. You can’t do that from a contact center across the country.

“Clinical-first, integrated care management, boots on the ground and a structural approach that is different in terms of our philosophy around denials versus provider enablement – that’s what we’re doing, and it’s fundamentally different from how carriers think about this.”

How Challenging Was It to Get the Business Running, and How Will You Execute Your Growth Future Plans?

It’s hard for health systems to get into this business because it takes investment, and health systems are struggling financially. They are under enormous pressure, there are a lot of competing priorities, and it takes a lot to stand up a new venture like this.

“You cannot do this by having somebody do it off the side of their desk.”

You have to build competency and capabilities. For example, we brought in people with skill sets that traditionally don’t exist within the health system. We’re selling an incredibly complex product in the insurance space, even though we’re not an insurance company. I have licensed brokers that work for me – that skill set and those broker relationships don’t exist in health systems. You have to invest in building the appropriate infrastructure. You need talent that doesn’t necessarily exist from within the organization, and you have to build capabilities. But you don’t need to do it all. Just pick one thing that an employer might need or have a conversation with a major employer in your region and ask what they would want help with and start there. Yes, there are competing priorities, competing investments and a tremendous amount of pressure, but I believe this strategy in the long term will alleviate those pressures.

In the next five years, we will expand the field of play and be a major regional player. There’s an opportunity to grow our network and the geographic footprint of employers we serve. In addition to that growth, we’re diversifying the ways in which we partner with employers. That means new products and services. That means rolling out digital platforms to augment our clinical capabilities. That means partnering differently, even within the insurance space. We’re going to roll out our own bundles and centers of excellence.

“I believe, fundamentally, there is a national opportunity here for health systems to partner together and for us to take the work we’re doing here, to line it up with the work that Baylor is doing in Texas, what Orlando Health is doing in Florida, what Providence is doing up in Washington and California, and for us to figure out how to stitch something together that would allow us to scale nationally.”

That’s a very complicated proposition. I don’t know exactly yet how it will come together, but I believe there are enough health systems that see this as an interesting space and that there’s opportunity for us over time to figure out how to make that possible together.

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Pathways

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Driven by customer interest and market demand, growth has become even more challenging to generate and sustain. Even top performers can no longer rely on their past strategies to achieve the next phase of growth. Beyond well-known barriers like tech-driven disruption and fickle customers, less tangible factors such as lack of executive clarity and short-term thinking pose significant threats. Sustainable growth now depends on unlocking compelling customer insights, identifying impactful growth moves and executing strategies quickly and efficiently.

Ready to accelerate your growth? Schedule a workshop.

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How To Get Back on a Growth Track in 2025

As businesses across Germany face ongoing economic challenges, our latest blog explores five essential strategies to help your organization realign, strengthen from within and forge a resilient path back to growth in 2025.

As we approach 2025, global economic challenges persist, with growth projections remaining modest and some even predicting a third consecutive year of mild recession. Across Germany, businesses in core industries are feeling the pressure of high interest rates, waning consumer demand and market volatility. In response, many firms are turning inward, prioritizing operational efficiencies over expansion. Yet, a focus solely on cost-cutting and efficiency poses deeper challenges for business leaders: how to sustain employee motivation and engagement, preserve hard-won progress and lay a solid foundation for a return to or even new versions of growth.

To guide your organization back to a growth track in 2025, here are five essential strategies: 

1. Re-Set Your Narrative With an Updated Story of Value

Challenging times can send out mixed signals – both internally and externally. Now more than ever, organizations need a unifying narrative that resonates deeply with employees and offers customers a clear, differentiated value. Especially in today’s recessionary climate, as we’re currently seeing in Germany, articulating your value in a way that is authentic and optimistic is essential.  

“When top employees and valued customers feel a compelling sense of purpose, engagement rises.”

When top employees and valued customers feel a compelling sense of purpose, engagement rises. Prophet’s new leadership tool, The Story of Value, brings tangible and intangible business assets into a distinctive and inspiring narrative. It crystallizes the unique value the business offers to shareholders, customers and employees. It simplifies a complex business into a compelling statement of value, creating a common language that inspires executives and employees internally while resonating with the market externally. 

Companies using the Story of Value tool are integrating it across critical areas, such as: 

  • Enhancing marketing and sales effectiveness through sharpened value propositions. 
  • Aligning corporate communications around a distinctive market narrative focused on core value. 
  • Strengthening the employee value proposition and modernizing foundational corporate assets (e.g., purpose statements, values, brand positioning) for a more cohesive culture. 
  • Arming finance, corporate development and IR teams with stronger investor day and roadshow presentations. 

2. Unlock the Moves that Propel Impact 

Now is the time for pragmatic innovation. In any business, there are actionable moves that can drive significant, measurable impact – whether by challenging a competitor or seizing a gap in the market. Identify actionable strategies based on customer needs and market opportunities that can be measured, optimized and scaled. Here are some examples of growth-oriented moves:  

  • Vision: Formulate a clear and reachable north star that every team member can rally around. Articulate the positive impact for individuals, the organization and society.  
  • Portfolio: Optimize your product portfolio for efficiencies.  
  • Marketing: Tap into new segments or double-down on loyalty with your most profitable audiences. 
  • Distribution: Test new routes to market, like direct-to-consumer models.  
  • Operations: Streamline processes and refine operational models.  
  • Talent: Foster mentorship between experienced employees and new hires in key areas like generative AI. Mentors provide guidance, while mentees bring fresh perspectives, benefiting both parties and building motivation through shared growth. 

3. Nurture Your Leadership and Team Collaboration  

Leadership teams, much like individuals, are dynamic ecosystems that require constant nurturing. Our proven method surfaces hidden challenges and fears, enabling leaders to address these openly and build a strong foundation of trust. This trust is essential for cultivating a high-performing leadership team unified by shared goals. 

Our annual Catalysts research shows that successful transformations hinge on genuine collaboration, where enterprise and individual goals are seamlessly integrated. High-functioning teams that shift from a siloed mindset to a team-oriented approach foster mutual accountability and alignment while also benefiting customers and the bottom line. 

The basis for this work is Prophet’s Human-Centered Transformation Model (HCTM), a comprehensive, people-centered approach designed to fuel growth across the organization. It’s built on the premise that organizations, like people, consist of interconnected elements: DNA, mind, body and soul. 

For leadership teams to thrive, they should follow a similar model where trust, collaboration and a shared sense of purpose are cultivated to drive meaningful outcomes.  The Human-Centered Leadership Team Effectiveness Model emphasizes that addressing all dimensions of the human system is crucial to unlocking potential and achieving impactful, sustained outcomes. 

4. Invest in Your Brand – Inside and Out 

In challenging economies, the power of a strong brand becomes ever more evident, underscoring the critical need to invest in it for continued growth. Yet, this imperative often isn’t fully recognized across the executive team. Without broad leadership commitment to brand investment as a strategic priority, efforts to secure and sustain resources can encounter resistance, limiting the brand’s potential impact on overall business outcomes. Market experience and research consistently show that established brands tend to grow market share in down economies, as customers seek reliability and stability. For instance, brands that increased their share of voice during the 2008 recession grew market share 4.5 times faster than those that did not. Investing in your brand drives business value through three key lenses: 

  • Revenue and margin: A strong brand enhances customer choice, loyalty and price premium.  
  • Valuation: Brand equity bolsters enterprise value and shareholder return. 
  • Talent attraction: A reputable brand strengthens the talent pipeline and reduces talent acquisition costs. 

5. Implement an Agile Change Management Strategy  

Returning to growth demands a robust, people-centered change management strategy that addresses both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of the team. Leaders need to be equipped to guide teams through the complexities of change, dealing with underlying thoughts and feelings to build trust, resilience and alignment.   

To be effective, change management requires a holistic approach that considers multiple dimensions. Define clear actions within each area to maintain a comprehensive focus, rather than concentrating on just one or two aspects. Navigating transformation is complex and demands a balanced strategy that meets organizational needs while empowering the people driving them. Skillful coordination is essential. Bringing in an experienced partner like Prophet, who excels in orchestrating comprehensive change initiatives can be invaluable in helping your organization thrive in today’s challenging business environment. 

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The path to growth is within reach through clear narratives, strategic moves, leadership focus, brand resilience and well-executed change management. Let’s talk about how Prophet can help get your business back on track in 2025. 

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Is Your Approach to Building Digital Strategy Holding You Back? 

In today’s hyper-competitive market, digital capabilities are no longer a “nice-to-have” but a necessity. 

Businesses are increasingly investing in digital solutions to meet rising customer expectations and drive growth. According to a study by McKinsey, over 65% of executives say their companies have increased spending on digital initiatives due to customer demand. Additionally, Gartner reports that 56% of CEOs view digital improvements as a top priority for driving revenue growth, underscoring the strategic importance of digital transformation. Yet, despite these investments, many organizations struggle to achieve the digital transformation they envision. Why? The problem often lies in the approach itself. Here are the most common pitfalls holding organizations back and how they impact the company’s ability to drive sustained growth—along with strategic shifts that can make a difference.

1. No Leadership-Level Vision, Product Ownership or Roadmap 

The lack of a clear vision and leadership buy-in can result in a reactive approach. Especially in sales-driven B2B companies, digital tools are often developed to address a single customer or account’s needs. Without a dedicated product owner or roadmap, development teams become consumed by short-term requests instead of working towards a strategic vision. This reactive approach leads to over-customization, technical debt and inflated budgets, which often produce low value for both the customer and the business. 

A digital strategy without a strong leadership vision can never become a catalyst for growth. To build and maintain buy-in, leadership must see digital transformation as integral to their overall growth agenda — not just an IT initiative but a central driver of efficiency, customer experience and new revenue streams. 

How this impedes growth: Without a clear digital vision, companies fail to differentiate themselves in the market, struggle with scalability and often miss out on new revenue opportunities. The result is stagnation in key growth metrics like customer acquisition, revenue and market penetration. 

Making the strategic shift: Successful digital transformations start at the top. It’s critical that leadership articulates a digital vision that aligns with the company’s overarching business strategy. This means moving beyond one-off digital projects to embedding digital as a core driver of the company’s growth. Clear product ownership is essential, ensuring that there is accountability for steering the digital direction and maintaining focus on long-term goals. A well-defined digital roadmap with a focus on scalability, innovation and customer value provides the necessary guidance to stay on course amidst competing priorities. 

2. Have a “Build It and They Will Come” Mentality 

There’s a persistent myth that launching a new digital tool or platform will instantly bring success. The truth is technology alone isn’t a silver bullet. Merely investing in a platform without understanding its role in your business strategy leads to wasted resources. Successful digital products require a deep understanding of customer needs and the flexibility to adapt as those needs evolve. They also need a strategy for driving adoption, both internally and with customers. 

When companies fail to integrate their digital efforts with their broader growth strategy, they miss opportunities to enhance customer engagement and increase market share. A poorly adopted tool becomes a sunk cost, diverting attention and resources away from other strategic growth initiatives. 

How this impedes growth: An underutilized digital product fails to generate the expected return on investment, resulting in lost revenue opportunities. It also undermines customer confidence, impacting long-term customer loyalty and retention. 

Making the strategic shift: Businesses must move beyond the “build it and they will come” mindset to a more holistic and customer-centric approach. This involves understanding not just what customers want, but how digital capabilities fit into the broader customer journey. Design thinking can play a pivotal role, driving companies to prototype, test and iterate digital solutions in close alignment with customer needs. Moreover, digital initiatives should be tied to measurable business outcomes. Aligning digital tools with KPIs such as customer acquisition, engagement rates or sales growth can ensure that investments are not just technically sound but also commercially viable. 

3. No Planned Funding Beyond Product Launch 

Launching a digital product is just the beginning, not the end. Yet, many businesses fail to plan for ongoing funding to support post-launch iterations, updates and user engagement. This lack of continuous investment can make even the best-designed product quickly obsolete. In fact, studies show that 70% of digital transformations fail, often due to short-sighted budgeting and underestimating the need for sustained investments post-launch (Boston Consulting Group, 2020). 

A lack of post-launch funding stifles innovation and prevents companies from responding to market changes. Digital platforms must evolve to keep pace with shifting customer expectations and technological advancements. Without a commitment to continuous investment, companies can’t capitalize on growth opportunities that arise from an agile and evolving digital strategy. 

How this impedes growth: A stagnant digital product reduces competitiveness and limits revenue expansion. Companies that don’t invest in product evolution will likely face declining engagement and lower profitability over time. 

Making the strategic shift: To truly leverage digital as a growth driver, companies must adopt a mindset of continuous evolution. Digital products should be viewed as living assets that require ongoing investment, iteration and optimization. Budgeting should reflect a commitment to long-term value creation, not just initial product launches. Agile methodologies, which emphasize iterative development and rapid response to change, can help companies adapt to evolving market demands. Measuring ROI should also be dynamic—regularly assess the impact of digital tools on customer behavior, market trends and competitive positioning to make informed decisions about future investments. 

4. Over-Customization of Tools vs. Keeping a Clean Core 

Customization can be a double-edged sword. Over-customizing platforms can create technical debt and complexity, making future updates costly and time-consuming. Instead, organizations should focus on maintaining a “Clean Core” — using standardized solutions for non-differentiating functions and investing in tailored solutions only for areas that offer a competitive edge. 

Customization may seem appealing in the short-term, especially to meet specific customer demands, but it often becomes a barrier to scalability. Over-customized solutions can bog down innovation and limit the agility needed to support a broader growth strategy. Companies need to prioritize their unique differentiators, focusing customization efforts on what will drive revenue and competitive advantage. 

How this impedes growth: Over-customization drains resources and makes scaling digital solutions difficult, hindering the ability to drive rapid growth. It leads to inefficiency, making it harder to adapt to market demands and ultimately reduces the speed at which a company can capitalize on new opportunities. 

Making the strategic shift: Businesses need to adopt a strategic approach to customization—focusing only on what truly sets them apart. A “Clean Core” philosophy means standardizing non-differentiating elements to minimize complexity while concentrating custom efforts where they matter most for strategic growth. This approach not only accelerates time-to-market but also allows for greater flexibility in adopting new technologies. Companies that embrace a modular architecture can scale faster, reduce technical debt and be more agile in responding to new opportunities, ultimately driving sustainable growth. 

5. Lack of Data Governance/Data Architecture That Fuels Strategy 

Data is the backbone of any digital initiative but without a solid data governance framework, it’s hard to turn data into actionable insights. Effective data architecture not only ensures data accuracy but also enables faster, more informed decisions. Lack of governance leads to data silos, poor data quality and an inability to fully leverage analytics and AI-driven insights. According to a Gartner report, 87% of organizations have low business intelligence and analytics maturity, largely due to weak data governance frameworks. 

Data-driven insights are crucial for identifying growth opportunities, optimizing operations and personalizing customer experiences. Without a clear strategy for managing and utilizing data, companies miss critical opportunities to refine their value propositions, improve customer targeting and drive revenue. 

How this impedes growth: Poor data governance leads to inaccurate analytics, inhibiting a company’s ability to make strategic decisions that drive growth. This can result in misaligned sales efforts, missed customer opportunities and suboptimal product development. 

Making the strategic shift: To truly harness the power of data for growth, companies need to invest in robust data governance and architecture. This means establishing a single source of truth for data, implementing governance policies that ensure data quality and creating frameworks that facilitate the integration of analytics across the business. Embracing AI and advanced analytics should be a priority, but it requires a solid data foundation. Organizations that can turn data into actionable insights will gain a competitive advantage, driving better customer experiences, operational efficiencies and new revenue streams. 

A Case in Best Practices 

A Prophet client in the parts manufacturing and distribution industry spent 15 weeks defining its digital strategy, roadmap and business case before launching a minimum viable product (MVP) to a subset of customers, with the CEO as the executive sponsor. The strategy focused on the desirability, viability and feasibility of the solution and included a three-year roadmap with stage-gate check-ins to ensure progress. 

Customer service representatives were trained to support new tools and traffic-driving tactics were embedded in the investment plan. As the platform expanded to different business areas, customizations were only adopted if they aligned with the broader strategy. A focus on streamlining data and reducing complexity minimized integration challenges. 

This thorough approach is paying off, with increasing adoption driving cost savings and new revenue growth in emerging market segments. 

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In a landscape where digital capabilities define competitive advantage, businesses can no longer afford to treat digital transformation as a separate initiative or a one-time investment. Success hinges on a holistic, strategic approach that aligns digital efforts with broader business goals. This means moving beyond the pitfalls of a “build it and they will come” mentality, fragmented leadership, limited funding, over-customization and poor data governance. By embedding digital deeply into the fabric of your organization’s growth agenda, you create a foundation that is agile, scalable and truly customer-centric.  

Those who embrace this shift will not only survive in an increasingly digital world but thrive, setting the pace for innovation and unlocking new paths to revenue and market leadership.  

Digital isn’t just a strategy—it’s the strategy that will drive sustainable growth for the future. 

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Unlocking the Next Chapter of Growth in Southeast Asia’s Financial Services

The Asian financial services landscape is diverse and constantly evolving, but also ripe with opportunities. One must-win area is the MSMEs. 

Geopolitical tensions are causing uncertainty and driving a wedge between economies sending rippling effects across the region. Many companies across the United States and Europe have been reshoring, with manufacturing hubs and operations diversifying to the Southeast Asia (SEA) region. As a result, shifting trade flows in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam have helped to boost players who are entrenched in these emerging countries. 

These shifting dynamics bring about increased challenges but also competition from bank and non-bank players seeking a piece of the pie. One such area is Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) who are already experiencing exponential growth and play a vital role in the economy. Among ASEAN member states for example, 85% of the workforce is employed by MSMEs and account for 44.8% of GDP. It is a segment that is a must-win. Coupled with the fact that 60% of MSMEs are underbanked in Asia, this represents a huge untapped opportunity for banks and non-banks looking to grow in the region. Moreover, the ASEAN trading bloc is the third largest economy in Asia and the fifth largest in th

So, how can banks and non-banks win in this dynamic environment?  

We have identified three emerging trends across the experience frontend and the operational and foundational back end to give players in the region a competitive edge. 

1. BaaS and Open Banking: Unleashing Collaborative Innovation 

Embrace Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and open banking principles to fuel collaborative innovation, specifically targeting MSMEs. Banks can use BaaS to “rent” out their core banking infrastructure through APIs, providing MSMEs with services they might not be able to develop themselves. Open banking complements this by enabling secure data sharing, allowing MSMEs to connect their accounts with these new services and gain a richer financial experience. 

Imagine third-party providers leveraging core infrastructure to develop financial solutions specifically designed for MSMEs. This could include tools for cash flow management, inventory financing, simplified loan applications and e-commerce integration. Banks and FinTechs can charge fees for its APIs, subscriptions based on volumes and share revenue with partners in both Open Banking and BaaS models. Furthermore, data insights and platform usage from these partnerships can help banks and FinTechs better understand MSME needs and develop innovative products. Many banks have started leveraging these collaborative strategies to drive further growth. Examples where this is already happening include: 

  • Standard Chartered Singapore’s SC API platform opened its data to developers, enabling partnerships with FinTechs that specialize in personal financial management for MSMEs. Customers can connect their accounts to receive insights, budgeting and tracking goals, leading to a 15% improvement in customer well-being scores. This demonstrates the potential of BaaS in empowering MSMEs and improving their financial health. 
  • Axis Bank in India implements a BaaS model that offers over 250 APIs through their portal. This allows startups and MSMEs to integrate banking services into their applications for seamless payment management and reconciliation. Their partnership with OPEN, a neo-banking FinTech company, specifically targets the micro-segment by launching a digital current account for freelancers and small micro-enterprises. 

These examples showcase how BaaS and open banking can be leveraged to create a thriving ecosystem of financial solutions specifically designed to address the needs of MSMEs by fostering collaboration and innovation. 

2. Ecosystem Platforms: Bridging the Gap Between Finance and Everyday Life 

Unlike BaaS and open banking which provide the building blocks for other businesses to create solutions, ecosystem platforms (also known as Super Apps) go beyond providing access to core services. They actively curate and integrate non-financial offerings, creating a unique value proposition. This translates into significant benefits, including increased efficiency and reduced costs for businesses of all sizes, especially MSMEs. By eliminating the need for customized integrations, Super Apps can provide MSMEs with access to a wider range of financial and non-financial services in a convenient and cost-effective way. 

Southeast Asia’s unique landscape, with a high smartphone penetration rate and a large unbanked population, has fostered the emergence of Super Apps since 2010. These platforms cater to the specific needs of the region, including those of MSMEs. Some recent examples include: 

  • Grab, a Singaporean powerhouse, initially a taxi-hailing service, has transformed into a ubiquitous platform offering ride-hailing, food delivery and other services – all crucial functionalities for MSMEs in the region. GrabPay, its mobile wallet has over 80 million monthly active users (2023), facilitates cashless transactions, money transfers and bill payments, simplifying financial management for MSMEs. 
  • SeaMoney integrated within the Shopee e-commerce platform, it allows users to make payments and access financial services directly within the app. This fosters financial inclusion for individuals and benefits MSMEs by providing them with a wider customer base and easier payment solutions. SeaMoney leverages Shopee’s vast user base and merchant network, which facilitated their rapid growth, scaling their financial services across SEA. This is also particularly attractive for MSMEs seeking wider reach. 

These examples highlight how Super Apps in SEA are strategically targeting MSMEs by offering a comprehensive suite of financial and non-financial services within a single platform. This integrated approach can significantly improve efficiency and reduce costs.  

3. DeFi and Blockchain: Taking efficiency, transparency and security to a new level 

Despite being the least mature concept among the three, the global DeFi (decentralized finance) market has already exceeded $200 billion, and the surging interest in blockchain among Asian consumers present exciting opportunities for banks and FinTechs in the region. Tokenization of both data and assets (into unique digital tokens on the blockchain) has provided the industry with endless opportunities with heightened security, transparency and speed. 

Imagine streamlined cross-border payments for migrant workers through secure blockchain platforms, replacing slow and expensive traditional methods. Trade finance can also be revolutionized by blockchain’s transparency and efficiency, fostering trust and reducing red tape. Furthermore, fractionalized investments in real estate and other assets, enabled by blockchain, can democratize access and increase liquidity, catering to the growing demand (from $4.8 to $22 trillion AUM over the past 20 years) for alternative investments among Asian investors (CAIA, 2024). While the use of blockchain technology for MSMEs in SEA is still in its early stages, many institutions are starting to experiment in this lucrative segment. Some recent examples include: 

  • In Singapore, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched Project Ubin, a multi-year initiative in collaboration with leading banks like DBS Bank, UOB, OCBC Bank to explore the potential applications of blockchain technology within the financial sector, specifically focusing on its ability to improve efficiency, transparency and security. 
  • Bank of Ayudhya, a Thai bank, partnered with Contour, a prominent blockchain platform, to streamline trade finance for MSMEs. This collaboration leverages the power of blockchain technology to address specific pain points for MSMEs in trade finance. By creating a secure, shared ledger accessible to all parties involved, blockchain eliminates the need for paper-based trails and intermediaries, streamlines communication, reduces errors, and expedites the entire trade process. This translates to potentially lower costs and faster transaction times for MSMEs. 

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Without a doubt, SEA’s unique financial landscape presents exciting opportunities for business growth. SEA customers are mobile-first, tech-savvy, and hungry for innovative solutions, creating a perfect ecosystem for exploring cutting-edge technologies like BaaS, open banking, Super Apps and DeFi. To truly thrive in this dynamic market, SEA banks and FinTechs need to embrace a growth mindset and explore beyond traditional models.   

Prophet partners with leading financial services organizations across Southeast Asia to help navigate complexities and unlock uncommon growth. Connect with us. 

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How Companies in Asia Unlock Growth Through Platform Strategy 

We explore the unique ways successful businesses in Asia are leveraging the platform strategy, a strategic framework defined by Ted Moser in his latest book. 

Digital platforms such as Amazon, Uber and Netflix have reshaped industries, seamlessly connecting businesses and consumers, while leveraging data and technology to deliver personalized experiences that redefine modern commerce and entertainment. The success of platforms highlights the transformative power of digital ecosystems in fostering innovation while driving sustainable growth. 

“Winning Through Platforms: How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One,” a best-selling book by Ted Moser, a senior partner at Prophet, highlights the essential role of digital platforms in achieving business success in the modern age across industries. The book serves as a playbook by diving into the different types of platforms as business models while decoding growth moves from a decade of platform competition. 

This framework guides companies to leverage platforms for brand relevance, customer value growth and efficient customer acquisition. 

Rapid Digitalization of Economies and Shift in Consumer Behavior 

Asia, especially Southeast Asia, is experiencing rapid digitalization and reliance on online platforms fuelled by a multitude of factors – the COVID-19 pandemic, internet penetration, a burgeoning middle class and supportive government policies. This shift prompted digital transformations across businesses, leading to a boom of digital marketplaces and services such as Shopify, Grab and Lazada.

Meanwhile, companies are heavily investing in strategies to create and meet demand across the entire customer journey. Companies focus on Demand Plays and Transformation Plays to meet evolving consumer needs and transition traditional businesses into digital domains. 

Temu: Aggressive User Acquisition Through Demand Plays 

Temu, a brand of China’s Pinduoduo, entered the global markets in 2022. It has quickly disrupted the status quo of the global e-commerce landscape, becoming the No. 1 shopping app on Apple’s App Store, surpassing Amazon, Target, Walmart and SHEIN. Temu’s success is made possible by its unparalleled demand-gen capabilities. Through the campaign “Shopping like a billionaire,” Temu offers a clear yet differentiating value proposition of providing cheap and accessible products for everyone. Beyond a clear brand message, Temu employs a comprehensive demand–gen strategy, from agile supply chain, data-driven user analytics, to aggressive marketing campaigns and pricing schemes, as well as savvy digital marketing and user acquisition tactics. 

Huawei: Leading at the Frontier Through Transformation Plays 

Huawei stands out as a prime example of strategic innovation in action. Initially recognized as a B2B telecom leader, the company seized the opportunity to diversify into B2C markets by introducing smartphones renowned for their cutting-edge camera technology. This transformation underscores Huawei’s unwavering commitment to innovation, as evidenced by the staggering investment of over 11 billion RMB in R&D over the past decade. Amid U.S. sanctions, Huawei demonstrated agility by strengthening its own HarmonyOS operating system. Recently, Huawei entered the electric vehicle (EV) sector by launching startup EV brands AITO and LUXEED in collaboration with automotive players Seres and Chery, respectively. These EV models integrate HarmonyOS for Automotive, seamlessly synchronizing with Huawei’s mobile operating system to deliver a cohesive user experience. This integration reflects Huawei’s vision of creating an ecosystem centred around HarmonyOS, extending its influence beyond telecom. By leveraging its technological prowess and strategic partnerships, Huawei has embarked on a transformation journey to shape the future of multiple industries, cementing its position as a global leader in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and innovation. 

Need for Innovative Solutions in Competitive Markets 

E-commerce, fintech, AI, and IoT have become some of the most disruptive technologies for traditional business models, where a holistic platform strategy plays a major role. In Asia, a fast-growing consumer market that’s largely digital – and mobile first – this is especially the case. Leveraging these technologies to develop their own platform through digital transformation while taking a customer-centric approach now becomes a key challenge for traditional companies. To adapt and futureproof, the most resilient companies are often agile in prioritizing innovation efforts. Prophet’s recent research on how innovation builds resilience revealed that 35% of the respondents in China and Singapore have formal innovation incubation programs, compared to only 15% of the respondents in the U.S. and the UK. 

Consequently, companies are channelling resources into the development of innovative platform features and services, leveraging Innovation Plays to continuously provide new and distinctive platform benefits for a competitive edge. Moreover, businesses strategically explore Portfolio Plays to diversify roles within the platform ecosystem, emphasizing continuous innovation across product development, market approach, and customer engagement strategies. 

Grab: Achieving Impactful Growth Through Innovation Plays 

Grab serves as a standout example of a platform business that maintains sustainable growth by bringing ongoing innovations to market. Originating as a ride-hailing service, Grab expanded into a super-app business, the “Everyday Everything App,” offering new products and benefits including food delivery, digital payments, and financial services. This strategic shift capitalized on Grab’s extensive user base and diversified revenue streams. Additionally, Grab deployed collaborative go-to-market strategies, by partnering with local governments and financial institutions, to extend its reach and tailor offerings to specific regional markets. To deepen its connection with a wide array of customers, partners and stakeholders, Grab has also further defined its company mission – to drive Southeast Asia forward by creating economic empowerment for everyone – while continuously implementing various ESG initiatives. 

Nike: Connecting with Evolving Customers Through Portfolio Plays 

Nike exemplifies effective portfolio diversification, transforming from product innovator to a digital marketplace leader. Nike integrates digital platforms with physical retail, offers market-specific mobile apps, and engages users through customized experiences and robust digital ecosystems. Through digital platforms like Nike Training Club and Nike Run Club as well as offline community activities, Nike engages with users beyond transactions. This platform-driven strategy not only solidifies Nike’s leadership in leveraging digital platforms for growth, but also resonates exceptionally well in the diverse and unique markets across Asia, where tailored experiences and integrated digital solutions are increasingly sought after.  

Regulatory and Cultural Diversity of the Region 

Asia’s diverse regulatory and cultural landscape poses unique challenges for platform businesses. With varying regulatory frameworks, cultures, languages and economies, consumer behaviors and preferences can differ vastly across different Asian countries. This complexity significantly impacts how companies approach market entry and expansion, where adapting their business models and marketing strategies to different regulatory and cultural contexts becomes pivotal. 

To effectively navigate these intricacies, companies employ Design Plays to develop differentiated value propositions that align with local preferences and cultural sensitivities. Meanwhile, companies should also tailor O+O customer experiences to different Asian customers through Interaction Plays, to enhance engagement and foster brand loyalty. 

IKEA: Mastering Localization Through Design Plays 

IKEA’s entry and expansion in China is a textbook example of a strategic design play, reflecting a deep understanding of local preferences and behaviors. Going beyond furniture sales, IKEA adapted its business model to overcome unique market challenges and fit the Chinese lifestyle. Product designs were adjusted for smaller living spaces, which was a shift from its offerings in European markets. As part of its location strategy and with the support from an extensive logistics network tailored to China’s infrastructure challenges, IKEA placed its stores nearer to city centers with easy public transport access, catering to most Chinese consumers who are less likely to own cars. Furthermore, by quickly embracing digital transformation, IKEA offered online shopping, home delivery services and popular payment options like Alipay and WeChat Pay, exceeding Chinese consumer expectations for retail convenience. 

Lululemon: Building a Loyal Community Through Interaction Plays 

Lululemon’s approach in Asia exemplifies a successful full-journey engagement, seamlessly integrating online and offline experiences, offering personalized assistance, and fostering community experiences. Through dynamic segmentation, Lululemon tailors offerings to diverse Asian audiences, driving conversions with personalized recommendations and localized content. Lululemon also adopts an agile content strategy, featuring regional influencers and traditional Asian wellness practices. It leverages user-generated content, including customer testimonials and photos, to foster authenticity and engagement. This customer-centric approach has strengthened brand loyalty and deepened the connection with customers in Asia. 

Reimagine Your Business Strategy with the Platform Mindset 

From Huawei’s transformative journey to Grab’s and Lululemon’s innovative strategies, these best practices exemplify how companies are leveraging platform plays to navigate Asia’s diverse market dynamics and evolving consumer needs. 

Whether your organization is already a platform business or not, adopting a strategic platform mindset is essential for companies to stay competitive today. From developing a comprehensive platform strategy to evolving existing capabilities, the six Platform Plays illustrated in “Winning Through Platforms” provide essential insights that inform actionable next steps for a futureproof growth strategy: 

  1. Assess your current capabilities and needs to determine the most suitable platform strategy.  Understand which role your platform can play within your business portfolio and select the one that aligns with your strategic goals.  
  2. Consider developing a comprehensive platform strategy that goes across all aspects of the organization. This involves clarifying how the optimal platform role aligns with the company’s strategic objectives to maximize differentiation and growth. Leaders must also identify the strategic implications of what must change in the business.
  3. Build an internal case for change and digital transformation while designing a transformation vision and roadmap. This includes the internal moves that need to be made from an organizational perspective, including structure, culture, processes, and capabilities.  
  4. For mature companies who have already found success in platforms, find opportunities to evolve your current platform strategy. Revisit customer experience strategies to deepen engagement and conversion; adopt more complex platform roles to drive deeper integration into the business; or harness the power of data and AI capabilities to refine and extend your ecosystems to new, differentiated offerings. 

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As Asian companies embrace innovation and customer-centric approaches, they are positioned to lead the way in shaping the future of digital commerce in the region. By harnessing the power of platforms, fostering strong customer relationships, and adapting to regulatory and cultural nuances, these companies are setting new standards for success in Asia’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. 

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Where is the Next Big Growth Opportunity for Streaming Services?  

Emerging markets represent a new growth space for global streaming services with Africa as the prime opportunity. Discover five essential strategies for launching and thriving in this fast-growing market.  

Global streaming services are facing a significant challenge: growth has stalled in many markets, forcing them to seek new avenues for expansion. Some, like Netflix and Disney, hope to boost revenues by cracking down on password-sharing. Other streamers are looking for growth by bundling. Warner Bros Discovery (owner of HBO Max) and Disney (owner of Hulu) recently announced a new package to capture subscribers in an increasingly competitive attention economy. And all this is happening in the context of a cost-of-living squeeze, impacting consumers’ willingness to pay for multiple subscriptions.   

Audience growth is available, but it lies in emerging markets like Africa, a region that many Western media executives have yet to consider. Africa is on the verge of a viewing avalanche, with the population expected to double by 2050, when the International Monetary Fund predicts it will account for over 25% of the global population. Importantly, these will be young consumers, with 60% under 25. They will be hungry for programming and new ways to watch it, in sharp contrast to the West, where aging populations may lead to stagnant technology adoption rates. Africa’s youth bulge presents a dynamic market eager for digital entertainment solutions. These are mobile-loving audiences, with some 613 million in sub-Saharan Africa – about half the region’s population – subscribing to mobile services.  

However, for streamers, growth in Africa is about more than demographics or devices. African content is a booming industry, making it a fertile land for streaming services. Nollywood – Nigeria’s film industry – is the second largest in the world by output, with over 2,500 movies annually. (It trails India’s Bollywood, but out-produces Hollywood.) And while early Nollywood content had a DIY video production quality, these shows and films have become increasingly sophisticated. Fuelled by new efficiency-saving technologies such as AI, the Nigerian film industry is honing its technique, expanding out of comedies and dramas and into horror, historical dramas, musicals and animation.  

Prophet has been working with Showmax, a joint venture between South African broadcaster MultiChoice Group, American media conglomerate Comcast, and Peacock, the streaming platform from Comcast’s NBCUniversal subsidiary – to expand service across Africa. Combining reality, drama and sport with local output in multiple markets, Showmax is expected to reach almost four million subscribers by 2029. From this work, we’ve developed five critical lessons for successfully launching streaming services that will captivate and delight African audiences:  

1. Local Content Is King  

American hits may create evergreen content libraries across the pond, but African audiences are most interested in local content produced in local languages for local audiences. (Sorry, “Sopranos,” “Game of Thrones,” and “Stranger Things.”)  Africa is rich in cultural diversity, with thousands of ethnic groups having unique traditions, languages and stories. Local content that taps into this diversity can resonate deeply with viewers by reflecting on their lived experiences, cultural nuances and societal values. Whether it is the “The Real Housewives of Nairobi” or “Cheta M,” a Nigerian Showmax original exploring young lovers who battle spiritual and political forces in their way, original African stories by local talent are the overwhelming favourites. And just as K-pop, Nordic noir and Brazilian telenovelas find fans well beyond national borders, these regional African narratives resonate with larger audiences, offering the entire continent a wider representation of people, places and perspectives.   

2. Mobile-First Optimization  

Optimizing streaming services for mobile viewing is crucial in all markets, but it is especially important in Africa, given the continent’s unique technological and market characteristics. Because of its limited fixed broadband infrastructure and the relative affordability of mobile technology, mobile devices are most Africans’ primary internet access point. A mobile-optimized service enhances engagement by improving usability on smaller screens and adapting to variable mobile data conditions. This approach aligns with the lifestyle of Africa’s young, tech-savvy population, who often consume content on the go. And it provides a competitive edge in a market where mobile connectivity is a norm.  

Streaming brands need to act now to capture these audiences, diving into local market needs to develop a deep understanding. Customer centricity is essential: Only companies that immerse themselves in Africa’s varied and nuanced markets will be able to develop the strategies, offers, pricing and content required to win with increasingly sophisticated African audiences.

Tosson El-Noshokaty, Partner at Prophet 

3. Cheap, Creative Access  

Effectively launching in multiple African markets requires a telecom partner that can provide cheap data, attractive bundles – or both. This makes it easier for a broader audience to access streaming services, increasing adoption. The economic landscape in many African countries is characterized by lower average incomes than in Western nations. Budget-friendly data options make streaming services more attractive and feasible for regular use. Going to market with a strategic partner also creates a competitive advantage. Offering these services through fractional pricing is another tool adopted by African streamers. Rather than monthly subscriptions, providing weekly or fortnightly tiered packages with different bundle offers can make a difference, maximizing accessibility and adoption.   

4. Direct Sales Impact  

Direct Sales Forces (DSFs) drive sales across Africa, capitalizing on over 90% of transactions conducted in cash. Unlike markets dominated by digital marketing and online sales, the African landscape often requires a tangible, on-the-ground presence to effectively reach and engage consumers. DSFs are crucial for navigating these unique market dynamics, including limited internet penetration and the preference for face-to-face interactions. DSF teams provide personalized customer service, handle cash transactions safely and build trust within communities, essential for converting potential customers into subscribers. Additionally, DSFs help educate customers about product offerings and troubleshooting, which is vital in regions where digital literacy is still developing.  

5. M-Pesa mobile money   

Cash is king in Africa, with sub-Saharan African credit and debit card penetration rates low at 3% and 18%, respectively. However, M-Pesa – an innovative mobile phone-based money transfer service – allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money, pay for goods and services, and access credit and savings, all with a mobile device. With over 50 million monthly active users, M-Pesa’s widespread adoption highlights the need for streaming services in Africa to integrate mobile payment options and a complex suite of payment providers, including card, PayPal and other mobile money solutions. These various payment integrations ensure seamless accessibility and convenience for users.  

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The rapid evolution of global streaming services demands innovative strategies for growth, especially as traditional markets become saturated. Prophet’s collaboration with Showmax underscores the transformative potential of targeting emerging markets like Africa. To thrive in such a competitive landscape, it’s crucial to adapt and continuously evolve. We can help your organization unlock new growth opportunities and connect with diverse, untapped markets worldwide. 

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New Strategy, Same Old Story: Your Story of Value Needs an Update

How updating your Story of Value can close the value gap and accelerate strategy execution.

The Frustrating Gap between Strategy Definition and Value Capture   

The poly-crisis moment that we (hopefully) are all navigating has generated a nearly ubiquitous reset of corporate strategies. According to Gartner, 79% of CEOs will have revisited their business strategy for the post-crisis environment by the end of 2024. These companies are now shifting attention to strategy activation to capture both productivity gains and growth.  

This is a profound pivot and, not surprisingly, teams are struggling to execute at pace. In our work with CEOs beginning in late 2022 and extending to today, we have seen a sharp increase in dissatisfaction with what you could call “value appreciation”. These laments commonly take one of the following forms:     

The Valuation Gap – “Our topline performance is strong, and we’ve built a superior platform. We’re aligned to long-tail secular trends. But analysts are having to work too hard to find that story line.” – Technology CEO 

The Differentiation Gap – “We have a unique collection of assets, especially our software/hardware stack, but no one, including our sales teams, can articulate a distinctive value proposition.” – Industrial CEO  

The Narrative Gap – “Our balance sheet is strong. Our portfolio matches the market. We have talented teams and everyone is working hard. But our corporate narrative is outdated. Everyone has their own version of what’s going on. We need a new, clearer, more inspiring story to rally around.” – Financial Services CEO   

These sentiments and others like them are being expressed by talented executives that have led global teams through multiple crises. They have successfully updated their strategies to meet the moment. Yet today they are also identifying a missing link between strategy articulation and in-market execution. Gaps that have material impact on share price, sales performance and talent economics.  

The Story of Value 

Working with these leaders Prophet has developed a new leadership tool, The Story of Value. At the highest level, the story of value brings the assets of business – both hard and intangible – into a sharp, distinctive and inspiring narrative. It is a story that crystalizes the value that the business creates for shareholders, customers and employees, defining its unique and essential role in the world. It simplifies a complex business into a compelling statement of value – a common language for executives and teams in words that are proven to win in the market.     

Companies are using Stories of Value to pull business strategy forward into various strategy execution workflows, including: 

  • Increasing performance of customer marketing and sales effectiveness through sharper value propositions.
  • Aligning corporate communications around a distinctive market narrative focused on core value.
  • Updating the employee value proposition and modernizing foundational corporate assets (e.g. purpose statements, values, brand positioning) to create a more cohesive culture.
  • Arming finance, corporate development and IR teams with stronger investor day and roadshow presentations. 

Writing Your New Story of Value  

Creating an effective Value Story requires going beyond frameworks and workshops. The Story of Value methodology combines a rigorous focus on asset value with market-back insights on value drivers. This data moves through a process that forces clarity and elevates language, culminating in market testing to refine the work and validate its business impact. The end result is both a practical, execution-ready deliverable and a leadership experience that builds cohesiveness and shared belief.  

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Is your company undervalued? Does your distinctiveness shine through? Are your teams on the same page with a winning narrative that drives commercial momentum and employee engagement? Have you updated your business strategy but feel that it’s not moving forward fast enough? It might be time to update your Story of Value.  

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Unlock. Create. Execute: A Guide for the New World of Growth

Three Pathways and Five Strategies for Accelerating Growth

Growth is rarely easy. Based on conversations with senior business leaders across industries, we sense an increasing recognition that it has never been more difficult to generate and sustain growth. To be clear, we are talking about growth driven by customer interest and market demand, rather than the temporary variety driven by acquisition, cost takeout or organizational restructuring. The bottom line is that not even top performers can expect that continuing to do what got them to market-leading positions will deliver the next phase of growth.  

Some of the common barriers – continuous cycles of tech-driven disruption, relentlessly fickle customers, talent mismatches – are well understood. However, less tangible and often overlooked factors – including lack of C-level clarity and confidence, short-term thinking and a history of unactioned strategies and plans – may be even more hostile to growth. Consider how senior leaders may lose faith in growth strategies when market opportunities shift more rapidly than the organization can pivot, refine its go-to-market approach or reallocate resources. Even when the right strategy is in place, limited ability to execute – or execute at the pace which growth now demands – may undercut returns.  

Because markets move faster than ever, we believe sustainable growth results from: 

  • Unlocking compelling customer insights to inform growth strategies 
  • Creating relevant, impactful growth moves 
  • Executing faster and more efficiently

How Rapid Changes in Customer Behaviors Impact Growth

The customer often has the answer. In today’s volatile markets, growth comes either through a proactive insight-led and customer-back approach, which is more sustainable, or by riding the wave of macroeconomic or societal trends. Unilever proactively changed its portfolio strategy after scoping the impact of the weight-loss drug Ozempic on consumer behavior. Modeling the likely changes in eating habits, Unilever chose to spin off most of its ice cream business, retaining only a few key brands (e.g., Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum).  

During the pandemic, companies like Peloton and Calm realized unprecedented growth as consumers re-evaluated their health and wellness priorities. Both companies have failed to make strategic, post-pandemic pivots to stay relevant.  

For firms that don’t want to leave growth to chance or market timing, success starts with deep insights into customer needs, as Prophet research shows.  

Insights From Prophet Research   

Among innovative companies, 84% have a consumer and market insights capability. 

Among all companies, 37% of leaders say senior executives pay too little attention to customer needs. 

In devising growth strategies, firms should factor in the impact of external macro trends on customers and the opportunities to provide new products and services to help customers navigate them. Even more broadly, executives should reflect on how these changes may influence who their customers are today and who they should be tomorrow.  

Charting the right course forward requires thoughtful decisions across key growth drivers that go beyond customer insight. In other words, firms must ensure that their good ideas are converted from slideware to clear action plans supported by necessary capabilities. Among the questions to address:  

  • Who is our target customer?  
  • What products, services and experiences should we offer?  
  • Why should customers care about our products, brand and purpose?  
  • How do they perceive the value we offer? 
  • Where and when should we engage customers – via which channels, ecosystems, platforms and partnerships?  
  • How will we capture value?  
  • What is the optimal operating model to deliver? 

The answers to these questions have short- and long-term implications. The resulting commitments will be ones the organization can sustain for years at a time. They will also determine what firms should do next quarter. Ideally, a clear customer vision will inspire the organization for the future while attentive, dynamic management of action plans will help firms keep up with constantly shifting customer needs and preferences. Firms should plan for frequent refinements and calibrations based on continuous learning about customer behavior, market feedback and competitors’ actions. Prophet research shows that organizations that meaningfully assess and recalibrate growth plans at least monthly are twice as likely to be successful, resilient innovators. Too many firms still think of growth investments as a matter of annual planning.  

What Happens When It’s All About the Short Term?

Unfortunately, immediate-term pressures – specifically that increasing revenue this quarter is always the top priority – may restrict investment in new offerings and thus narrow future horizons. According to Prophet research, 34% of business leaders say their firms overemphasize short-term results. A similar proportion, 37%, say their organization has no long-term planning process. “You’re constantly in this space of change,” one told us. “Plans are abandoned almost as soon as they are made. There’s no real plan because things just sort of happen.”  

Such reactive postures are no surprise given the pace of disruption. They necessitate that firms build new capabilities even as they are running their growth plays. Those capabilities are often housed in agile, test-and-learn oriented and cross-functional teams, which have proven to be more proficient in delivering against growth objectives. Fully 80% of respondents in our global survey said design-led innovation teams are important, but only 37% said their organizations have such units in place. Developing these capabilities is not easy, of course, but they provide the foundation for self-funding innovation programs and, thus, sustainable growth.   

Insights From Prophet Research   

  • 63%: organizations lacking design-led innovation teams 
  • 37%: organizations lacking a long-term planning process 
  • 2x: organizations that meaningfully assess and recalibrate their innovation moves at least monthly are twice as likely to be successful, resilient innovators 

Pathways to Uncommon Growth  

Strategies aligned to these pathways will manifest differently in varying contexts and sectors and they are not mutually exclusive; some firms will emphasize one, while others will experiment with portfolio approaches that include all three. Boldness and creativity can be different makers for these approaches; the bolder the growth strategy, the more likely firms will differentiate themselves in competitive markets.  

1. Expanding beyond the core. In this approach, businesses narrow in on customer needs to enter a new market or customer segment, offering complementary products or services to meet a broader range of customer needs. This approach requires the least risk tolerance and least amount of change within a business. And it’s likely to produce quick wins. For example, through the height of the pandemic, companies developed products and services to reduce transmission and care for the ill. Today, companies are looking beyond point solutions and specific problems to focus on more holistic views of respiratory health. Large pharmaceuticals with separate products in testing, treatment and prevention of upper respiratory infections have reorganized their product portfolios around complete and cohesive solutions offered through retail channels.

2. Venturing into adjacent territories: This approach is about uncovering value in products, services and experiences that are closely related to existing strategies. It requires a moderate risk tolerance and degree of change as it explores efficiencies based on existing strengths and capabilities. When done right, firms find differences from the core business but still share commonalities and avoid channel conflict.  

One financial services company coordinated loan refinancing through third-party aggregators. Realizing it had a unique capability to simplify fragmented lender requirements for consumers, it saw an opportunity to own more of the customer relationship. Prophet helped the company refine its value proposition, create a product roadmap and launch its first pilot into market, all while building the product, technology and marketing teams needed to sustain the effort. As a result, the company remained vital through a volatile inflation and interest rate environment, deploying its direct-to-customer capabilities to launch new services, reach new markets and grow its relevance. 

3. Pursuing net new growth from innovation and emerging customer demands: This is the boldest approach, the one most associated with breakthrough innovations from true disrupters. It involves playing in novel markets or industries, creating forward-looking solutions that get ahead of emerging preferences and aspirations that have yet to fully manifest in mass consumer behaviors.  

Not surprisingly, this mode of growth requires the highest level of risk tolerance, the greatest creativity and most substantial change as it pushes businesses to step out of their comfort zone to pioneer new offerings that anticipate customer needs. Companies often invest in cutting-edge technologies, enter new industries or markets undergoing disruption or create entirely new business models by bringing together an original set of capabilities. 

Durable goods manufacturers – faced with acute supply chain disruptions, a long-term trend towards higher-cost, near-shore manufacturing and mixed results from interventions by smart home technology companies – might reasonably wonder whether they can successfully stand up a services model to future-proof their businesses. Spurred by Tesla, car manufacturers now consider the automobile as an updateable software platform, requiring the application of digital integration, user experience and technology expertise throughout design and production processes; they then sell subscriptions to unlock services like OnStar and Apple CarPlay. Appliance manufacturers like Samsung continue to grapple with the elusive promise of Internet-connected screens on refrigerators, washing machines and other home appliances. And manufacturers of entry and exit points, like doors and windows, can seriously consider their products’ roles in connected, smart security services. 

Five Key Capabilities for Unleashing Growth

Once firms identify the right path to growth as outlined above, they must determine the best way to advance quickly, efficiently and purposefully. Too often, this step turns into a stumbling block. However, organizations that possess a few key capabilities and cultural attributes can create the capacity and build the organizational muscle memory to launch new products, devise new business models and execute other types of growth strategies repeatably. They’ll also enhance their ability to operate these new businesses efficiently and scalably. The keys to success are:  

1. Using cross-functional GTM teams to achieve speed to market: When growth is everybody’s job, it may become nobody’s job. On the other hand, growth is too important to be left to small innovation labs or single functions (e.g., marketing, sales, product development). Rather, firms should build cross-functional teams charged with launching new products quickly. Even if the team is small, it should pull from finance, HR, technology, design, strategy and other parts of the organization. Why? Because all of those domains make important contributions to the development of new offerings.   

2. Building a coalition of stakeholders for informed decision-making: To execute successfully, growth leaders must have a clear understanding of the critical path of decisions, identify the necessary data inputs to inform key decisions and maintain a steady pace against clearly defined milestones and gates. However, informed decision-making typically doesn’t happen fast enough, especially in large and complex organizations. Delays are especially likely when decision rights are unclear, contested politically or when a large number of stakeholders must be involved n. Ideally, growth leaders will develop a comprehensive coalition of stakeholders throughout the organization parallel with the work to ensure that everyone is on board with coming changes and understands their role in execution. Such a coalition can help ensure depth and alignment of key capabilities. 

3. Making GTM innovation BAU (business as usual): Any organization seeking sustainable, customer-led growth must find ways to make the capabilities necessary for organizational reinvention, portfolio refresh and continuous learning part of business as usual. For instance, cross-functional growth teams should work within a well-defined go-to-market process, reflecting the reality that launching, operating and scaling new products and business are not “special projects” but an essential part of ongoing operations.  

4. Moving at the speed of growth: Across both growth strategy formulation and go-to-market execution, speed is the name of the game. Some organizations are equipped to strategize and execute at speed, but many struggle. To make these plays work for your organization, you need to increase your organization’s speed to:  

  • Customer insight: understanding what they want, which channels they prefer and where they’re likely to go next
  • Strategy: converting customer insight into strategic priorities 
  • Market: turning strategic ideas into in-market action  
  • Impact: accelerating the delivery of real-world results  
  • Capability: creating the foundation to scale and sustain higher levels of performance 

Speed matters because organizations can only grow as fast as their ability to adapt.  

5. Getting up to speed with AI: Faced with the need to go faster, many companies are turning to AI. One media company used AI to track consumer preferences, which led to the creation of a new business model centered on interactive and original content. AI tools are helping CPGs to develop prototypes more rapidly. A hospitality leader has embedded AI in enhanced search experiences to drive discovery and rentals of vacation homes.  

While these applications make sense, leaders should recognize that AI is not a silver bullet to accelerate capability development. Rather, businesses need to understand the targeted ways AI-powered customers interact differently with AI-enabled employees. From that customer-back vantage point, organizations can look to create opportunities to optimize, enhance and reinvent engagement (Be on the lookout for upcoming Prophet research that reveals how consumers really feel about and use AI.)  

One More Thing: Balancing the Risks and Rewards of Growth 

Strategic discussions often emphasize the external barriers preventing firms from realizing the upside.  The risks of growth – and the organizational appetite or tolerance of such risks – is less frequently examined. We believe this is an oversight. Senior leaders must attend to the necessary cultural aspects of unleashing growth, including management mindsets.  

While everyone automatically says they want growth, they won’t necessarily be comfortable with the risks involved in launching new products, deploying resources, modifying operations and all the other necessary steps to achieve meaningful growth. As such, leaders would do well to explore just how “growth tolerant” their firms really are. That’s especially true of today’s dynamic, “high-VUCA” (Volatility, markets. When firms face high degrees of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, growth demands greater organizational resilience. In other words, senior leaders that help the organization become more flexible, adaptable and agile are laying the foundation for sustainable growth.  

Acknowledgments: Marc Anderson and Griffin Olmstead

How Prophet Helps

We take a collaborate and human-centered approach to help leaders unlock compelling customer and market insights; create relevant growth moves; and develop the capabilities to execute faster and more efficiently.  

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Growth has become even more challenging to generate and sustain driven by customer interest and market demand. Even top performers can no longer rely on their past strategies to achieve the next phase of growth. Beyond well-known barriers like tech-driven disruption and fickle customers, less tangible factors such as lack of C-level clarity and short-term thinking pose significant threats. Sustainable growth now depends on unlocking compelling customer insights, identifying impactful growth moves, and executing strategies quickly and efficiently. 

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Avoiding Common M&A Pitfalls: Three Key Strategies to Maximize Value

Unlock post M&A success with three simple plays: engage customer-facing leaders, craft a value narrative, and revamp talent models.

It has never been more critical to get post-M&A value creation right. With markets in a state of protracted uncertainty, businesses are more cautious about deploying capital and less patient for concrete returns. M&A activity continues in the pursuit of both revenue and margin growth, but only the most focused operators can achieve each deal’s potential on short timelines and tight budgets. 

We consistently see companies leave value on the table: they fail to reach their goal for value realization, don’t reach it in time, or back away and hedge due to a lack of confidence in the investment thesis. In the end, closing these gaps falls to the business leaders tasked with running the post-deal entity. Here are three key strategies to close those gaps. 

Conversations with business leaders involved in post-M&A activities revealed three crucial yet often overlooked factors—referred to as executional gaps—that executives must address to successfully achieve the value of the deal. 

  1. Leaving customer-facing leaders out of the loop 
  2. Deals with no value story 
  3. Rigid talent models that erode people value (talent and culture) 

Gap 1: Leaving Customer-Facing Leaders Out of the Loop 

For practical and legal reasons, deal teams typically operate with secrecy. This leads to scrambling across the organization when a deal nears announcement. Marketing, communications, and talent teams often become disconnected, resulting in lackluster strategies. This inefficiency puts a time lag on customer-facing decisions and can result in the wrong decisions being made. Brand changes, go-to-market portfolio construction, talent integration plans, and other high-level decisions end up being led by an isolated deal team rather than in partnership with the organization’s functional experts. 

One M&A leader at a large healthcare company said: “Customer value isn’t realized until much later on because it isn’t planned for. [You are already] considering customer [downside risk] in the deal valuation, [why can’t the upside potential] be considered and planned for as well?”    

Recommendation: It’s unnecessary to complicate the M&A process by adding members to the team during due diligence. Instead, build a new step or action within the playbook to pulse out information from the core deal team directly to operating teams when moving toward close. This will help line leaders immerse themselves in the deal thesis and adopt accountability earlier in the process.

Gap 2: Deals With No Value Story 

Just because deal teams and capital committees understand the value creation thesis; it doesn’t mean that the deal has a value story. Ultimately every audience affected by the deal will need to know how this deal is adding value for them. Yet, internal and external stakeholders often receive very different versions of the story, if they hear anything at all. These fragmented stories don’t always connect, functioning like “point solutions” that speak to the short-term implications for a specific team, rather than amplifying the impact of the deal through a consistent, cohesive narrative that flexes across audiences and still ties back to a single core idea. 

One M&A leader underscored that “the deal story aligns the organization, and it gives them the fuel to change, doing the hard work to realize the value at the core of the deal premise.” This reflects what we’ve seen in market with acquisitions like Danaher’s acquisition of GE Lifesciences. Danaher had a unified plan and story for the acquisition, clearly creating a cohesive message that flows through each key audience. Danaher understood how the entire GE asset – from technology and product portfolio to customer relationships and brand equity – would combine into a powerful new life sciences operating company well before the deal’s close. That plan was then echoed to leaders across the company and into the marketplace. In the end, that cohesive story powered a new operating company, Cytiva, which was central to Danaher’s 110% share performance in the two years following the close of the deal.

Recommendation: Identify an expert, usually from the marketing, brand or communications team, to develop a story of value with the help of a cross-functional team communicating to different audiences. Marketing might personalize the core story for customers while investor relations might develop messaging aligned to what investors are looking for. The communications team might tweak the message for partners and Human Resources might build a North Star narrative for employees. While each message might be slightly customized for the intended audience, each must ladder up to an overarching message to drive alignment and spark value creation. 

Gap 3: Rigid Talent Models That Erode People Value (Talent and Culture)

While it’s critical to capture value by addressing internal synergies post-close, it’s also important to de-risk the integration plan by recognizing the unique cultural and talent contributions the acquired team brings. The asset likely carries new capabilities, usually with hard-to-hire skill sets which must be thoughtfully redeployed in the post-close entity. Moreover, if it was a successful operation before being acquired, it would have been fueled by a unique culture that needs to be acknowledged, and potentially leveraged as a touchstone for renewal or transformation.  

Several M&A leaders echoed this perspective saying, “If the primary driver of value is something tangible, the culture is overlooked because it is hard to value,” “If you force rigidity on a company, that drives culture mismatch, and it skips over the secondary value question of if the talent and culture could improve your own,” and “If you say ‘hey we love your asset,’ you need to consider the culture and people that created that asset, or you have blinders to the full value of it.” They also spoke to the importance of HR leaning in, as their insights can be critical to understanding what employment shifts will resonate within a company.

Recommendation: Build an employee ignition module into the playbook to build a human-centric strategy for retaining and activating the talent and cultural assets acquired in the deal.

Tech companies have adopted this approach; recognizing the significant value of the talent assets they are acquiring. Apple maintains an acquisition pipeline primarily looking for top talent from the acquired business or redeploy throughout their earn-out tenure. Apple views the acquired talent as a flexible, scalable asset to be used to drive growth well beyond the specific team or company in which they entered the firm. This flexibility not only lowers talent acquisition costs but also serves as a new “Talent Model” lever for value creation, speeding up value realization by applying the strongest talent to the most critical tasks. 

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These gaps slow value capture and erode M&A returns. However, in our work with corporate development and business leaders, we have seen teams apply these three plays to close these gaps and improve deal performance.  

  1. Instead of leaving customer-facing leaders out of the loop, build a step in the playbook that pulses information to critical post-close operational leaders. 
  2. Instead of running diligence and integration without a clear narrative, write a story of value that focuses teams on strategic intent and execution priorities. 
  3. Instead of rigid talent models that erode people value, build an employee ignition module into your playbook that scales new capabilities, preserves key talent and leverages cultural capital. 

If you want to get the most out of your M&A deals, we’re here to help you unlock success. 

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Two Ways to Operationalize Your Portfolio Strategy for Market Growth 

In this article, we provide actionable recommendations of how the demand-to-growth landscape can be operationalized for driving tangible growth. 

As competition intensifies and consumers grow increasingly fragmented, brands today must find ways to identify a precise pathway for growth. A successful growth strategy relies on a meticulously crafted portfolio strategy that acknowledges growth sources from layered perspectives. It shouldn’t merely react to present market dynamics but also anticipate future shifts in demand. 

To accomplish this, it’s critical to construct the demand-to-growth landscape, which serves as a pivotal initial step for companies to reach their growth ambitions. 

Define the Portfolio Strategy with a Demand-to-Growth Landscape 

In a previous article, we introduced the demand-to-growth landscape (hereinafter referred to as demand landscape), a systematic study that decodes category opportunities, and how it is best used to shape portfolio strategy, inform brand positioning and refine product portfolio. 

Operationalize the Portfolio Strategy to Accelerate Growth  

After developing a robust portfolio strategy using the demand landscape, leaders must then pinpoint the strategic anchor points within their categories for execution. Bill Gates once aptly stated, “The most brilliant strategy won’t lead to success unless it’s executed effectively.” This rings especially true in today’s business landscape, where marketers are required to show measurable results with every investment.  

Depending on the business and industry, the best way to operationalize and execute the portfolio strategy might look different. Here, we highlight two key applications: 

Application 1: Managing Consumer Segments Through the CRM  

The approach below offers an effective solution to companies aiming to utilize CRM effectively to manage strategic consumer segments from end to end.  

Leveraging the CRM: For companies heavily involved in digital and direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels, particularly in the apparel and beauty sectors where customer loyalty and retention plays a vital role, the CRM system is an indispensable tool. However, marketers often struggle with the vast amount of unorganized customer data, unable to capitalize on the valuable assets to drive meaningful engagements. Incorporating the portfolio strategy could offer a unique solution. 

Evaluating the Portfolio Strategy: A portfolio strategy enabled by the demand landscape analysis unveils how different brands under a business portfolio should capture different consumer segments. It’s crucial to strengthen the value exchange between these brands and their designated consumer segments, in order to guide consumers toward purchasing the brands and products designed for them. Throughout this process, brands must take an agile and iterative approach to ensure investments yield the desired outcomes by establishing effective methods for measuring progress and learning from efforts. But how? 

This is where the CRM system and the portfolio strategy come together. To effectively achieve the aforementioned goals, it is imperative to map the strategic consumer segments of the demand landscape against existing CRM data, i.e., tagging each individual consumer with the corresponding segment.  

Once each customer profile is categorized into its respective strategic consumer segment, brands are able to monitor segment growth by analyzing CRM data, thus indicating the effectiveness of the portfolio strategy and its execution.  

Advanced organizations may also synchronize digital and e-commerce efforts to customize product recommendations and content marketing to each customer based on the portfolio strategy (i.e., brand, product, and proposition relevant to each individual), thus accelerating strategy execution. 

Approach 2: Landing Portfolio Strategy at Retail Channels Through OBPPC 

This approach is particularly critical for companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector, where navigating diverse consumer needs and a complex retail environment is paramount. With the demand landscape approach, companies can formulate a portfolio strategy aimed at capturing distinct consumer segments and consumption occasions. However, they must also differentiate themselves at the moment of truth to meet the unique preferences of diverse shoppers within each channel. 

Hence, there is an opportunity to bridge the demand landscape and the Occasion Brand Price Pack Channel (OBPPC) models. The OBPPC framework was initially introduced by Coca-Cola to enhance on-channel execution. In essence, this model ensures that companies cater to varying shopper needs by offering the appropriate brands, packages, and price points within target channels. By providing a tailored assortment, more consumers can find satisfaction, and the company can strategically shift the demand curve for those who are less price-sensitive. 

All shoppers are different. They have different values and different preferences which lead to different price elasticities. We can create value by recognizing the differences in purchase occasions, and by offering a unique assortment of brands, packages and price points for each channel they are served by.

The Coca-Cola Company

Bridging the demand landscape with the OBPPC model offers a robust approach to operationalizing the portfolio strategy.  

By systematically following these steps, companies can effectively align their portfolio strategy with consumer demand and channel dynamics, maximizing opportunities for success in the marketplace. 

Contributors: John Wu, Associate; Yang Yu, Associate

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A strategy holds significance only when it seamlessly transitions into execution. With a well-defined demand landscape and portfolio strategy, marketers excel at implementing the strategy in an iterative way that will achieve sustainable and transformative growth. For consumer brands, depending on their industry, leveraging the portfolio strategy to manage consumer segments through the CRM and landing it at retail channels through OBPPC will be the two most effective approaches. 

Need help identifying your brand’s demand-to-growth landscape and operationalizing your portfolio strategy? 

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