sprowtTalk to Sprowt

So, what'snext?

You’ve got market share, defended legacy ground and there are big expectations. But growth feels messier than it used to. The market is moving. Customers are changing. New competitors are appearing from places you weren't watching. What got you here isn't necessarily what will get you there.

Or maybe nothing is obviously wrong. The numbers look good. The business is growing. But there’s an inkling that something is shifting, and you’d rather figure out what it is before it becomes a problem.

Sprowt works with leadership teams at inflection points to figure out what's really going on, what it means for the business and what to do 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.

01

You think you need to find a new market.

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

02

You think you need a new product.

Perhaps customers aren't buying the existing one for the reason you think.

03

You think you need to find a new audience.

Perhaps you've stopped understanding the one you've already got.

04

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.

05

You think you need to transform the business.

Perhaps the first question is what you're transforming it for.

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 messy, multifaceted and there are often multiple things that are happening at once.

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.

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.

  • ↳What do you do when a business everyone knows stops being one people choose?+

    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?

  • ↳Where should we play next?+

    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 for the business, what needs to change, and what to do about it.

The Underneath

What gets lost between knowing people and understanding them.

An ongoing exploration of the human truths, contradictions and behaviours that don't always fit neatly into the boxes businesses put people in.

Go underneath →

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 get close to the people, pull apart what's happening inside and outside the business, challenge what everyone thinks they know and figure out what it actually means.

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 answer and most importantly, what to do next.

Proof

Challenges that have stopped our clients from sleeping.

Understanding what's really going on

Questions about customers and behaviour.

FMCG: DRINK

01

Future growth / Portfolio strategy / Customer understanding

Future growth

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.

OUTCOME:

Built a new better-for-you proposition, diversifying the portfolio.

FMCG: CONFECTIONERY

02

Next generation / Brand relevance / Customer understanding / Product innovation

Next generation

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?

OUTCOME:

Overhauled the product portfolio, innovation pipeline and priority markets, creating a clear five-year growth roadmap.

HEALTH TECH

03

Future proposition / Service innovation / Commercial strategy

Future proposition

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.

OUTCOME:

Defined the product vision to move from clinical intervention to ongoing support — now going into production.

FMCG: DRINK

04

Reinvention / Proposition / Commercial strategy

Reinvention

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.

OUTCOME:

Defined a proposition that delivered the board’s ambition in a way consumers could understand and want.

WOMEN'S HEALTH / HEALTH TECH

05

Category creation / Customer understanding / Future vision

Category creation

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.

OUTCOME:

Built a brand consumers loved and retailers wanted to stock.

BEAUTY

06

Next generation / Beauty / Customer understanding

Next generation

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?

OUTCOME:

Identified the white space, defined what it would take to win and helped unlock expanded retail distribution.

FMCG: FOOD

07

Brand reinvention / Organisational change / Future growth

Brand reinvention

How do you get back to what made a brand brilliant in the first place?

A fast-growing food brand had built its success by being bold, instinctive and willing to do things differently.

Unfortunately, as the business grew, so did everything around it. More people. More processes. More layers. More opinions. The things designed to help the business scale had inadvertently started to stifle some of the energy that had made the brand successful in the first place.

The challenge wasn't to reinvent the brand into something new. It was to rediscover what had made it distinctive, strip away what had accumulated around it and work out how that spirit could show up in the next stage of growth.

Sometimes what's next isn't about adding more. It's about getting back to the thing that made you brilliant before everyone got involved.

OUTCOME:

Created a clear proposition and go-to-market strategy that helped make it the fastest-growing brand in its category.

Got a question like this one?Bring it to us →

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.

We don't really care which box the answer falls into.

Brand. Product. Customer. Commercial. Experience. Organisation. Market.

The biggest business questions tend to cut across all of them.

That's rather the point.

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.

Working out what comes next

The things going round and round in our clients’ heads.

01 / 06

FMCG: FOOD TECH

01

Customer understanding / Proposition / Commercial opportunity

Customer understanding

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.

OUTCOME:

Sharpened the proposition, driving significant sales growth and expanded retail distribution.

Yours next?Let's talk →

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.

bring us the difficult questionbring us the difficult question