Introduction: Sales Were Slipping, But the Cause Was Unclear
A well-established consumer goods company found itself at a crossroads. Despite decades of steady growth, recent months had seen a noticeable decline in revenue and profit. Leadership suspected weakening sales were to blame, but they lacked clear, data-backed insight into why it was happening.
Internal reports offered some signals, but the company’s tools weren’t robust enough to isolate trends, customer patterns, or performance indicators. Without direction, their marketing and sales strategies were stalled. They turned to Brewster Consulting Group to uncover the root cause and build a plan for recovery.
The Challenge: More Questions Than Answers
While the symptoms were obvious, declining sales across nearly all channels, the underlying issue remained elusive. The company couldn’t tell if the problem stemmed from product performance, shifting customer behavior, channel inefficiencies, or market saturation.
Their attempts to solve the issue had become trial and error, adjusting pricing, tweaking promotions, shifting distribution, but none of these efforts moved the needle. Leadership had a growing list of questions, but few meaningful answers.
They needed a partner who could go beyond surface-level reporting and deliver deep analytical clarity.
The Solution: Analytics that Asked the Right Questions
Brewster began the engagement by conducting a comprehensive analysis of historical sales data, segmenting product types, flavors, and distribution channels, including in-store and online purchases. Interestingly, the data showed uniform decline across most product categories and channels, ruling out specific SKUs or sales platforms as the culprit.
Instead of stopping there, Brewster shifted focus to the company’s customer behavior trends, particularly purchasing frequency and lifecycle status.
What emerged was a pivotal insight:
Loyal, long-time customers were not dropping off. In fact, those who had made 10+ purchases over the past two years were increasing their buying volume.
This insight reframed the entire narrative. The problem wasn’t that customers were leaving, it was that new customers weren’t coming in.
Strategic Insight: From Retention to Acquisition Focus
With clarity on the real challenge, customer acquisition rather than retention,
Brewster presented a clear, data-backed strategy.
The company’s marketing efforts had been overly focused on maintaining loyalty and driving repeat purchases. But the data showed that their loyal base was already performing well. The bigger gap was at the top of the funnel, reaching new audiences, converting them, and nurturing early-stage buyers.
Brewster recommended:
- A shift in marketing strategy
toward first-purchase incentives and awareness campaigns.
- Development of new customer KPIs, including acquisition cost, conversion rate, and first-to-repeat purchase timeframes.
- Redesigning lifecycle campaigns
to guide customers from trial to loyalty.
- Building a segmented customer dashboard
to track acquisition metrics by product, region, and campaign source.
With this new insight, leadership reallocated budget from broad retention campaigns to high-impact acquisition channels and created internal targets for customer base growth.
Results: Strategy Shift, Revenue Rebound
Armed with a fresh understanding of their true challenge, the company quickly adapted its marketing, sales, and customer success strategies. The results were almost immediate:
-Marketing ROI increased
as acquisition-focused campaigns attracted more new customers.
-Customer lifetime value
grew, driven by clearer conversion paths and repeat purchase incentives.
-Leadership had real-time visibility into customer metrics, allowing them to act with speed and precision.
-Perhaps most importantly, the team now had confidence in their direction,
with a data-driven plan guiding their next moves.
Conclusion: Real Strategy Starts with the Right Data
This case is a perfect example of how data clarity can transform a company’s trajectory. What started as a vague performance issue turned into a focused, strategic initiative once the root cause was understood.
With Brewster Consulting Group’s support, the consumer goods company stopped guessing and started acting, replacing assumptions with insights, and hope with measurable strategy.