How an FMCG Company Unlocked Agility with Quantive StrategyAI

Leaders typically struggle with effective strategy evaluation. Keeping a company on track with its goals while ensuring changes reflect market conditions can be daunting, especially if siloed data, lagging insights, or inconsistent metrics are involved. 

Facing similar issues, Bliss Bites, a leading confectionary company, decided to find a better way to evaluate its latest strategy, choosing Quantive StrategyAI as its perfect solution. 

Quantive StrategyAI, a leading Strategic Intelligence Platform, helped them effectively evaluate and refine their strategy in record time. The company leveraged Quantive StrategyAI’s expert guidance and strategic insights to keep their strategy relevant. Executives swiftly moved from situation to decision to plan, supported by streamlined data collection and real-time collaboration tools. 

Before exploring how Bliss Bites used Quantive StrategyAI for strategy evaluation, it's important to note that Bliss Bites is a fictitious company, and this is a fictitious case study created for illustrative purposes. Now, let’s first understand the circumstances that led them there. 

Bliss Bites is a well-established confectionery company that creates premium, high-sugar, indulgent treats. Yet, growing awareness about health and wellness has prompted their most recent strategic pivot: They want to capture a share of the market for health-conscious sweet treats by launching a new, multi-flavored product line of low-sugar chocolate bars. 

Their strategy evaluation challenges

As part of their strategic shift, they set new goals and metrics. However, they faced several challenges with their current strategy evaluation approach, making them unsure if they could effectively measure the success of their efforts. These included: 

• Inconsistent performance metrics which made strategic comparisons challenging  
• Delayed feedback loop which created delayed responses to market changes and a widening strategy-execution gap 
• Siloed departments which resulted in disjointed strategy execution and evaluation 

These challenges prompted Bliss Bites to seek an end-to-end strategy management solution that could streamline their strategy evaluation with real-time insights.  

Quantive StrategyAI emerged as the ideal solution to address these issues.

Bliss Bites identified Quantive StrategyAI as the solution to their strategy evaluation challenges due to its robust capabilities, specifically: 

• Real-time progress reporting: With over 170 integrations, Quantive StrategyAI automates data collection from various sources, reducing manual input and ensuring timely information for rapid strategic decisions 
• Unified performance metrics: Standardizes KPIs and objectives across the organization with executive and metrics dashboards, ensuring consistent and comparable evaluations 
• Collaboration tools: Drives seamless collaboration and data sharing across teams and departments with features like Whiteboards, weekly Check-ins, comments, and reactions to progress updates 
• Automated reporting: Offers automated reporting capabilities, providing stakeholders with regular strategy updates to keep everyone informed, engaged, and accountable  

Now, let’s look at how Bliss Bites navigated the five steps of strategy evaluation using Quantive StrategyAI. 

Bliss Bites’ executives collaborated on Quantive StrategyAI’s Whiteboard feature to create the following annual company objective and key results, alongside supporting key performance indicators (KPIs): 

• Objective: Boost market share in the healthy snack segment by 20% within one year 
• Key result: Achieve an 18% increase in monthly sales growth of the low-sugar product line by the end of Q4
  • Supporting KPIs: Monthly revenue from low-sugar products, number of units sold per month 
• Key result: Attain an average customer satisfaction rating of 92% or higher for the new product line by the end of Q4 
  • Supporting KPIs: Average rating from customer feedback surveys, number of positive reviews on e-commerce platforms, customer retention rate for the new product line 
• Key result: Increase social media engagement by 30% through creative campaigns promoting the new low-sugar product line by the end of Q4  
  • Supporting KPIs: Growth in social media followers, engagement rate of promotional campaigns, number of likes, shares, and comments on social media posts 

Satisfied with this goal, they were ready to communicate it to key stakeholders.  

They assigned each objective and key result to the relevant stakeholders across departments, adding KPIs as lagging indicators. This ensured stakeholders could quickly access goal progress and understand how their contributions impacted the overall objective. 

To measure the company's objective and key result progress and assess the success of its new low-sugar product line, Bliss Bites' teams collect a variety of data on sales, customer feedback, and market impact.   

With Quantive StrategyAI, this process is easy. The platform's 170+ integrations allow Bliss Bites teams to directly feed data from other applications into their objectives and key results as well as KPIs. For example, they can automatically update their KPI related to the number of units sold using real-time data from Salesforce. In addition to dynamic updates, Bliss Bites set KPI projections to help them visualize their expected outcomes. 

By aggregating these data points and ensuring ongoing communication, visibility, and progress updates in Quantive StrategyAI, Bliss Bites leadership and stakeholders can maintain a bird' s-eye view of its strategic progress. 

To ensure they evaluate their strategy effectively, leaders break down their strategic analysis into multiple parts: 

1. Comparing actual vs. projected results 
2. Understanding the causes of successes and failures 
3. Analyzing performance metrics against benchmarks 
4. Pinpointing data trends and patterns 
5. Analyzing workstream and resource contribution to strategic progress 
6. Assessing the need for a strategic pivot  

A. Comparing actual vs. projected results

Upon analyzing their objective and key results and KPI performance in Quantive StrategyAI, Bliss Bites discovered that their third key result wasn’t progressing as expected. Despite their efforts, the social media engagement rate had only increased by 6% halfway through the year. At this rate, meeting their goal of a 30% increase by the end of Q4 was unlikely.  

B. Understanding the causes of successes and failures

Bliss Bites assessed its marketing campaign data, including CTR, conversion rates, customer feedback, and social engagement metrics, to uncover the reasons behind this shortfall. 

They found that their social media strategy for their new product line needed a significant overhaul. 

Their social presence for sugary products focused heavily on indulgence and decadence with messages like “treat yourself” and “guilty pleasure.” This conflicted with the marketing of their new health-focused snacks, which emphasized being “clean,” “safe,” and “guilt-free.” 

This misalignment led to a lack of customer recognition, excitement, and desire for the new offerings, resulting in lower customer engagement on social media and reduced overall sales.   

C. Analyzing performance metrics against benchmarks

Bliss Bites also compared their results with industry benchmarks. They found their social media engagement to be significantly lower than competitors, indicating their engagement issues were not industry-wide but rather, specific to their approach. 

D. Pinpointing data trends and patterns 

Digging deeper into their social media performance, Bliss Bites identified two key patterns: 

• Engagement was shallow during weekday mornings, suggesting their target audience was more active on social media during evenings and weekends 
• Posts featuring user-generated content (UGC) and micro-influencers in the fitness, health, and wellness niches received significantly higher engagement than promotional posts, with notable impacts on sales linked to these influencer posts 

E. Assessing the need for a strategic pivot

Armed with these insights, Bliss Bites realized a strategic pivot was necessary. They turned to Quantive StrategyAI to help them revamp their strategy. 

For suggestions on strategic updates, they input the following prompt into Quantive StrategyAI:  

“Despite Bliss Bites' efforts, social media engagement has only increased by 6% halfway through the year, falling short of our 30% target. We found this to be due to a disconnect between our traditional indulgent branding and the new health-focused messaging of our low-sugar product line. We need help creating a new social media strategy based on these insights.” 

They added more context by highlighting additional data findings, supporting Quantive StrategyAI in crafting a highly customized strategy based on Bliss Bites’ circumstances. Then, they uploaded all relevant business documents and market insights into Quantive StrategyAI to provide more details. 

These documents included: 

• Vision and mission statement 
• Recent annual report 
• Social media performance reports 
• Competitor analysis reports 
• Market research reports 
• Previous marketing campaign reports 
• Industry benchmark reports 

Using this data, Quantive StrategyAI generated a decision map covering various hypotheses for Bliss Bites to evaluate, including customer considerations, go to market, and branding & marketing. 

Bliss Bites then chose to create a SWOT analysis to analyze these hypotheses. As a result, Quantive StrategyAI generated the following: 

This thorough analysis revealed one clear next step: They needed to update their digital strategy, especially for social media. 

Happy with Quantive StrategyAI's guidance on making a decision, Bliss Bites' executives implemented a new social media strategy focused on influencer partnerships. 

They planned to rely on influencer partnerships to promote their new product line, encouraging influencers to use messages like “guilt-free delight” and “decadent yet nutritious” when referring to Bliss Bites’ healthy products. This approach would add credibility to their new products and bridge the gap between their branding and the new product line. 

To put their plan into action, they: 

• Identified influencers whose followers align with their target demographic 
• Selected influencers with high engagement and credibility in promoting a healthy lifestyle 
• Collaborated with these influencers to create authentic content showcasing their low-sugar products, including recipe videos, product reviews, and lifestyle posts 
• Measured the effectiveness of these campaigns using engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, CTR) 

For accountability and progress tracking, Bliss Bites’ marketing team created an additional, lower-level goal to support the original third key result (“Increase social media engagement by 30% through creative campaigns promoting the new low-sugar product line by the end of Q4.”) 

This new goal was: 

• Objective: Ramp up social media engagement using influencer partnerships  
• Key result 1: Partner with 20 micro-influencers who align with our target demographic and have high engagement rates 
• Key result 2: Generate 55 pieces of authentic content (recipe videos, product reviews, lifestyle posts) from influencer collaborations 
• Key result 3: Achieve a 25% increase in social media engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, CTR) from influencer campaigns 

Bliss Bites' teams hold a one-hour virtual meeting with key stakeholders every Monday to assess the progress of their updated strategy. During these, teams review the latest goal updates from Quantive StrategyAI’s Insightboards, Reports, and individual Check-ins, discussing progress, addressing issues, and gathering feedback.  

Between meetings, Bliss Bites’ teams use several StrategyAI features to stay aligned, including 

comments, reactions, confidence levels, and progress reports. This process keeps teams informed and on track, enabling quick goal updates while ensuring everyone focuses on tasks that drive key strategic objectives. 

As a result, Bliss Bites has dramatically improved its strategy evaluation and updating process by replacing manual tracking with collaborative, transparent, and automated progress updates using Quantive StrategyAI. This allows Bliss Bites to quickly analyze, implement, and reassess strategies based on real-time insights, ensuring they stay agile and responsive to changing circumstances. 

Bliss Bites’ success story with Quantive StrategyAI showcases the power of the right Strategic Intelligence Platform for adaptability. By relying on Quantive StrategyAI’s advanced analytics, real-time insights, and streamlined data collection, Bliss Bites not only overcame significant strategic hurdles but also quickly refined its strategy to align with market demands.o 

If you, like Bliss Bites, want to go beyond gathering strategic insights and feed these right back into your strategic plan for an adaptive and agile approach, Quantive StrategyAI is a must-have in your tech stack. 

Want to learn more? See how Quantive StrategyAI’s capabilities can take your strategy evaluation to the next level. 

Quantive empowers modern organizations to turn their ambitions into reality through strategic agility. It's where strategy, teams, and data come together to drive effective decision-making, streamline execution, and maximize performance.      

As your company navigates today’s competitive landscape, you need an Always-On Strategy to continuously bridge the gap between current and desired business outcomes. Quantive brings together the technology, expertise, and passion to transform your strategy and playbooks from a static formulation to a feedback-driven engine for growth.     

Whether you’re a fast-growing scale-up, a mid-market business looking to conquer, or a large enterprise looking for innovation, Quantive keeps you ahead – every step of the way. For more information, visit www.quantive.com.