Case Studies
Recently we've been helping high-growth start ups to refine their business strategies. Check out our impact below, or drop us a line to see how we can help you level-up your sustainable profits.
Improving a £10m start up's comms strategy
Koru Kids is a childcare tech start up based in the UK. They're creating sustainable social infrastructure for working parents, to improve the life of the whole family. But they had a serious communication problem. They were growing at such speed that their brand voice had lost consistency, and customers were being bombarded with a mixture of automated and personal messages from different staff. Things had become so muddled they were losing clients.
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Marcus was brought in to diagnose the communications problems, and implement solutions quickly. Over two days Marcus mapped every step of the customer journey - conducting mystery shopper exercises and interviews with staff at all levels to understand every possible iteration of a customer's journey - from lead to client.
Marcus created a detailed flow map, showing the type of communication being sent, the sender, and the timeline. From this, he identified numerous redundancies and feedback loops. Prospective clients were receiving dozens of emails a day, often with conflicting information.
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Marcus used AI tools to analyze hundreds of customer feedback emails and identify recurring trends. On this basis, he focused on streamlining customer communications, and improving brand consistency.
Marcus worked with the operations team to understand where process changes could be safely made. He began by introducing automation rules to optimize the email experience. By reducing the frequency of messages to one per day, and putting the customer's key updates in a single email, he increased both opening rates and customer engagement - resulting in better conversions and happier users.
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Marcus proposed a new, simplified customer journey flow to the operational and executive teams. He presented this as an interactive flow chart, which showed the entire journey from a bird's eye view, while containing useful detail that could be retrieved at the click of a button, to compare examples of old vs new comms and see what's changing. With the company's approval, Marcus worked with the marketing team to create new email templates for each step of the simplified customer journey.
He then collaborated with the operational teams to trial the new system, and ensure it was user-friendly for the team's working patterns and experiences. He established which of the company's the best communications platform to use for each stage of the customer journey, and trained the ops teams in the new systems, also creating a clear handbook for them to use for future reference.
The results of Marcus's communications optimization strategy was a 20% boost in the company's Net Promoter Score in the four weeks that followed, a decrease in support calls to customer service, and increased lead conversion.
Product strategy for a new market entrant
A luxury vegan beauty start-up was nearing the end of its R&D phase, and needed its pre-seed MVP to be ready for bigger seed investors. The passionate team were drowning in ideas, and needed help prioritizing and monetizing features. They booked a series of development workshop days with Cambridge Climate Consulting to rescue the product and ensure they were ready for their pitch deadlines.
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We began with a market-fit analysis. By refining their target audience, competitors, and core proposition, we were able to increase their price point, establishing a better market fit for the luxury sector.
We then created a bespoke development strategy. We ranked product features according to the end users' core needs. Using this solid basis allowed us to show the client, and their investors, a clear path to monetization.
By de-prioritizing "nice-to-haves", we helped the client to save a significant amount of time and energy that would have diluted their core offering at this stage.
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The start-up (still in stealth mode) were able to present an outstanding first product and robust business model to their investors, along with a roadmap for the next development cycles. Their seed fundraising was a success, and the company continues to work closely with Cambridge Climate Consulting as they scale-up and pursue B-Corp accreditation.
Creating a unique brand voice
As a bestselling author of eco fiction, Marcus understands the importance of having a personal brand that resonates with your audience.
Following a successful launch campaign, his debut book series Convulsive won three literary awards. However, sales plateaued prematurely as the series wasn't gaining mainstream traction.
Marcus undertook a full re-branding exercise. He began by researching market competitors - analysing their brand artwork and voice. He then emulated best practice methods, redesigning the covers to have a brand uniformity and style that was both immediately familiar to target audiences, and uniquely different at the same time.
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He designed multiple contrasting versions of the front covers, then ran A/B split tests across social media target audiences, and his existing newsletter followers. From the results, he identified the cover that best appealed to his target readers.
He then repeated the same activity to ensure the messaging on landing pages and ads was equally optimized, before publishing the final changes.
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As sales improved, Marcus increased the daily advertising spend in manageable increments. Within four months of completing the five-part series, and the extensive rebranding activities, the boxset became an international #1 bestseller.