So, what'snext?

You’ve got market share, defended legacy ground and there are big expectations. But, growth feels messy. Relevance is fading. Messaging is all over the place. Sales, marketing, stakeholders, all have conflicting and competing priorities. The brand edge you once owned is buried under process, politics, and more PowerPoint slides than any human should be forced to endure.

Sprowt helps leaders answer the difficult questions about what comes next.

  • Why have we stopped growing?
  • What do our customers really think about us?
  • How do we stay relevant when everything around us is changing?
  • What are we missing?
what got you here won't get you therebring us the difficult questionthe problem beneath the problemwhat happens next?where should we play next?when the old answers stop workingwhat got you here won't get you therebring us the difficult questionthe problem beneath the problemwhat happens next?where should we play next?when the old answers stop working

The problem

Sometimes the problem you're trying to solve isn't actually the problem.

You think you need a rebrand.

Perhaps, customers don't understand why they should choose you.

You think you need a new product.

Perhaps, there's far more opportunity sitting inside the one you already have.

You think you need more marketing.

Perhaps, you're talking to the wrong people.

You think growth has stalled because the market is difficult.

Perhaps, the business has simply lost sight of what made it valuable in the first place.

We help you find the problem beneath the problem, and then help you do something about it.

The questions we love

The best problems don't come with a brief.

They're rarely neatly packaged as a marketing problem, a product problem or a customer problem.

They're messier than that.

Something has changed, but it's not obvious what. Different parts of the business have different theories. The data points one way. Customers point another. And there's usually a perfectly sensible answer everyone is already gravitating towards.

That's where we get interested.

Before you decide what to do, you need to be sure you're solving the right problem.

We get underneath what's really going on, bring together the different perspectives and find the question that actually needs answering.

Then we crack it.

  • How do we make a legacy brand relevant again?+

    The brand still has awareness. It still has history. People still know the name.

    But knowing you and choosing you are two very different things.

    What still matters? What needs to change? And what should never be touched?

  • Our market has moved on. Have we?+

    Customer expectations change. New behaviours emerge. Categories blur. Competitors arrive from places you weren't watching.

    Sometimes the business keeps doing what made it successful long after the reason it worked has disappeared.

    Where has the market moved — and where should we move with it?

  • How do we find the next source of growth?+

    You've spent years optimising the core business.

    Eventually, squeezing harder isn't enough.

    The next opportunity might sit with a different customer, occasion, channel, product, proposition or market.

    Where should we place the next bet?

  • We've built something new. Will anybody care?+

    The business loves the product.

    The technology is clever. The functionality is better. The team can explain exactly why it's different.

    But customers aren't buying the engineering.

    What does this actually unlock for them?

  • How far can our brand stretch?+

    There's an opportunity sitting next door to the business you already have.

    But entering it could unlock significant growth — or dilute the very thing that made you successful.

    Where do you have permission to play?

  • The business is performing (for now). But what's next?+

    Sometimes nothing is obviously broken.

    That's exactly when the most interesting questions appear.

    What aren't we seeing? What is changing around us? Where are customers heading? What could threaten the business? Where could the next disproportionate opportunity come from?

    You don't have to wait for a problem to start looking for the next opportunity.

You don't need to know the answer before you call us.

That's rather the point.

How we think

Start with people. Not assumptions.

Most organisations know an extraordinary amount about their own business. The danger is that eventually you become too close to it.

  • Internal language becomes normal.
  • Assumptions become facts.
  • Everyone knows why something exists, so you assume customers do too.
    There are mutterings of 'this is the way we have always done it' (aka the most destructive statement to ever have existed)

We step outside the organisation and look back in.

We get close to customers. Look at behaviour rather than simply what people say. Pull apart the category. Challenge internal assumptions. Find contradictions. Connect things that haven't been connected before.

Then we work out what it means commercially, and what to do about it.

Our approach

We don't start with the deliverable.
We start with the question.

The answer might be a new proposition. A different customer. An untapped market. A product opportunity. A completely different experience.

Or it might be validating the hunch you've had that the rest of the business can't see (yet).

Our job isn't to sell you a predetermined answer. It's to understand the real challenge and work out what happens next.

How we work

Get close. Pull it apart. Figure out what it actually means. Define what's next.

We combine deep customer understanding, commercial thinking and creative problem solving.

We use whatever the challenge needs: research, workshops, strategic sprints, customer immersion, proposition development, commercial modelling, prototyping and creative thinking.

The biggest challenges don't sit neatly in one part of a business. So we don't work in silos. We bring the right people together from across the organisation, combining different perspectives to understand the problem and work out what comes next.

No enormous strategy deck that nobody opens again.

A clear and concise way forward.

Proof

Challenges that have stopped our clients from sleeping.

FMCG: DRINK

01

Future growth / Portfolio strategy / Customer understanding

How do you future-proof a business when 60% of its revenue is tied to one product?

A major drinks business had a hugely successful product at the centre of its commercial model. But customer behaviour around the category was changing.

The question wasn't simply how to sell more of the existing product. It was: where should future growth come from if the thing that made the business successful couldn't be relied upon forever?

We helped the team get underneath changing customer behaviour, understand where future value could sit and identify the strategic choices available to the business. Then we went about creating a prototype to test in the real world.

FMCG: CONFECTIONERY

02

Next generation / Brand relevance / Customer understanding / Product innovation

How do you make an iconic brand matter to the next generation?

An iconic confectionery brand had been part of people's lives for generations. But heritage doesn't automatically create relevance.

We needed to understand a new generation on their terms: how their world was changing, what mattered to them and what role an established brand could credibly play within it, and what would these products need to look/feel like and deliver to appeal.

The question wasn't: how do we make young people like us? It was: what does this brand need to mean to a generation growing up in a completely different world?

FMCG: FOOD TECH

03

Customer understanding / Proposition / Commercial opportunity

What if customers aren't buying what you think you're selling?

A food innovation business had developed a genuinely clever product. Inside the business, the story centred around the product itself: how it was made, the technology behind it and why it was functionally better.

However, customers weren't thinking about the technology. They were thinking about their own lives.

We went back to the customer to understand what they actually valued, the progress the product enabled and where the commercial opportunity really sat, and how does it need to be communicated.

Often the breakthrough isn't changing the product. It's understanding what people are really buying.

HEALTH TECH

04

Future proposition / Service innovation / Commercial strategy

What would you build if you weren't constrained by what exists today?

A specialist healthcare organisation wanted to rethink how people with ADHD and executive functioning challenges are supported. The easy answer would have been to improve the existing service.

Instead, we started with a different question: what do people actually need to live better lives?

That meant looking beyond diagnosis and beyond the existing operating model to understand the experience before, during and after someone asks for support. We brought cross-functional teams together to rethink the proposition, experience, partnerships and commercial model from the ground up.

The ambition wasn't a slightly better version of today. It was to ask what should exist tomorrow.

FMCG: FOOD

05

Growth strategy / Customer understanding / Proposition

How do you take a brand from niche to mainstream without losing the people who got you there?

A fast-growing food brand had built a strong following within a relatively small audience. The business wanted to grow beyond it.

The obvious answer was to market harder to more people. Instead, we went back to the category and the customer to understand why the proposition wasn't travelling.

The breakthrough was deceptively simple: from a dairy-free alternative designed around a specialist audience, to a delicious product that happens to be dairy-free.

The shift created a platform for the brand to reach a much bigger audience without abandoning the customers who already loved it.

FMCG: DRINK

06

Reinvention / Proposition / Commercial strategy

How do you give a famous brand a new reason to matter?

A household-name British brand was going through fundamental change. The organisation had made significant changes to the business behind the scenes and had a much bigger ambition for what the brand could stand for.

The challenge wasn't simply communicating what had changed. It was: why should anybody outside the organisation care?

We helped turn a major organisational shift into something customers could understand, believe in and act on. Transformation inside a business only creates value when it means something outside it.

WOMEN'S HEALTH / HEALTH TECH

07

Category creation / Customer understanding / Future vision

How do you build a brand for a life stage women don't want to be defined by?

Women's health was finally starting to talk about perimenopause. But much of the category still made the condition the most interesting thing about the woman experiencing it.

We needed to understand women beyond their symptoms: what was happening in their lives, how they felt about this stage and what they actually wanted from a brand built to support them.

The question wasn't: how do we build another perimenopause brand? It was: how do we make women feel understood without asking them to define themselves by what they're going through?

That became the foundation for a very different proposition: perimenopause is the least interesting thing about you, delivered via supplements and an education led ecosystem.

BEAUTY

08

Next generation / Beauty / Customer understanding

How do you make an established skincare brand relevant to a new generation?

An established global skincare brand wanted one of its ranges to become synonymous with the treatment and prevention of breakouts for a new generation.

But competing for Gen Z meant understanding acne as more than a functional skincare problem. Breakouts affect how people feel, what they do and how confidently they show up in the world. We needed to get underneath those emotional moments and understand what the brand needed to stand for beyond product efficacy.

The question wasn't: how do we sell acne products to Gen Z? It was: what role can this brand play in helping a new generation feel like a breakout doesn't get to decide what they do next?

FMCG: EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS

09

Category strategy / Proposition / Customer understanding

How do you find white space in the ultimate commodified category?

Toilet paper is a category where products can feel largely interchangeable. Softness, strength, price, sustainability — everyone is competing around versions of the same things.

A fast-growing sustainable brand wanted to move from niche choice to mainstream household staple. But better packaging and stronger marketing weren't going to be enough. We needed to understand what customers actually valued, where the category had become predictable and where there was space for the brand to mean something different.

The question wasn't: how do we sell more sustainable toilet roll? It was: where is the white space in a category where customers have been taught that every product is basically the same?

That meant moving beyond sustainability as a specialist reason to buy and building a proposition with the potential to make bamboo feel like the obvious choice for families who are living in a constant trade-off.

SUBSCRIPTION MEAL BOXES

10

Market change / Proposition / Customer understanding

What do you do when the market that made you successful changes around you?

A pioneering food business had helped create an entirely new way for people to buy fruit and vegetables. But the market didn't stand still.

Supermarkets changed. Meal kits grew. Customer expectations shifted. And a proposition that had once felt distinctive was becoming harder to explain.

The challenge wasn't simply to remind people what the business did. We needed to understand what still made it valuable in a market that now offered customers far more choice.

The question wasn't: how do we make the brand louder? It was: when the market has changed, what is the reason to choose you now?

MALE GROOMING

11

Behaviour change / Male grooming / Customer understanding

How do you change a behaviour people have spent a lifetime learning?

A business was looking to change the way men cared for their hair.

But changing a product is easy compared with changing a behaviour. For many men, haircare wasn't something they'd been taught to think deeply about. Their routines were often habitual, functional and built up over years.

We needed to understand the relationship men really had with their hair: how they thought about it, the routines they'd developed, what they cared about, what they didn't, and what would need to change for a new behaviour to feel worth adopting.

The question wasn't: how do we get men to use a different hair product? It was: what would make men rethink the way they've always cared for their hair?

What we can help you crack

The approach depends on the challenge.

  • Sometimes it'sabout getting clarity on the customer.
  • Sometimes it'sa new or tightened proposition.
  • Sometimes it'sentering a market you hadn't considered.
  • Sometimes it'schanging the product or identifying product extension/innovation.
  • Sometimes it'srethinking the whole customer experience.
  • Sometimes it'sgetting the organisation aligned around one direction.
  • And sometimes it'sstopping the thing you were convinced you needed to do.

Our work can take us into:

  • Customer understanding and segmentation
  • Future proposition and innovation
  • Market and category opportunity
  • Positioning and value proposition
  • Portfolio and product decisions
  • Customer experience
  • Go-to-market
  • Commercial opportunity
  • Organisational alignment
  • Brand and communications

Why Sprowt

The right brains for the problem.

Sprowt isn't a traditional consultancy and it isn't an agency.

We build senior, specialist teams around the challenge in front of us.

People who've worked inside some of the world's biggest organisations and fastest-growing challengers. Researchers. Strategists. Commercial thinkers. Creatives. Operators.

Different brains see different things.

Our job is to bring the right ones together.

Businesses naturally optimise what already exists.

Tweak the existing product slightly. Throw more money at the situation. Get a new logo. Fire your agency.

Sometimes that's exactly the right answer. But, most of the time you end up in exactly the same place.

What you need is someone to find out whether you're solving the right problem in the first place. That's where we come in.

Trying to work out what comes next?

It doesn't need to be a perfect brief.

In fact, we'd rather it wasn't.

Tell us what's keeping you awake. What's changed. What doesn't make sense. The thing you're seeing that nobody else in the business seems to see. Or the decision you can't quite make.

We'll start there.

We need to talk →
bring us the difficult questionbring us the difficult question