A consumer brand with eleven active channels, three website relaunches in four years, and a leadership team that had reopened the same “where does the brand live online” question every planning cycle.
The brand had grown by adding channels for eleven years. Each one reported to a different owner, and no two of them measured success the same way. Every planning cycle a website relaunch was commissioned, shipped, and quietly failed to change anything, because each channel had a sponsor who could show that its own numbers looked fine.
Our brief, as written by the CMO, was a website redesign. Our first act was to tell her she had already had three of those.
Discovery
Rather than re-scoring eleven channels, we spent the first two weeks agreeing a single constraint with the CMO and the CFO: the budget the brand was willing to have committed outside its website by the end of the following year. That number, once written down, did most of the work.
Owner interviews entered the work in week five. They should have been in week one. It turned out to be the constraint leadership actually cared about, and running it late meant two of the retirement sequences had to be re-cut.
What we did
The roadmap named the website as the center, five channels to keep and connect, six to retire or fold in, and the sequence. It also named the two channels where our recommendation was close, and said so, because a plan that presents every call as obvious invites the room to reopen all of them.
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Leadership approved it in a single session. The CMO later said the difference was that the paper arrived before the meeting rather than during it.
“You are not missing a website. You are missing a decision about where the brand lives that everyone is willing to be held to.”
The outcome
Six channels were retired or folded in over the following three quarters, one quarter ahead of the approved sequence. The website relaunched as the hub in week ten. No channel owner left during the programme, which had been the CMO’s stated fear.
The “where does the brand live” question has not been reopened since.
