Commercial Clarity for FMCG and Consumer Brands
Independent brand diagnostics & commercial advisory for consumer-led businesses. We work with FMCG / CPG leadership teams, founders, and private equity on the strategic choices that decide what a brand is worth—and how to realise that value.
BRAND DIAGNOSTICSThe factors driving your brand’s equity are rarely in your KPI dashboard.
A Brand Diagnostic establishes what is creating brand equity, what's holding it back, and which strategic choices are genuinely still available. We run three distinct brand diagnostic reports, depending on where your brand is in its lifecycle, and who is commissioning it.
BRAND INVESTMENT REPORTPre-Investment Diagnostic
Before capital is committed. Whether the brand supports the case being made for it, what the upside actually depends on, and what it costs to get there. Written for the investment decision, not a valuation.
BRAND OUTLOOK REPORTPost-Investment Diagnostic
After a change of ownership or other liquidity event. What the brand has to do to justify the price paid, the headwinds and tailwinds across the next five to seven years, and which exit routes remain open.
BRAND FORENSIC REPORTPost-Exit Diagnostic
A brand post-mortem, after the outcome is known. A full diagnostic read on the factors that caused the brand to fail or find an offramp—and the decisions that determined its fate. Free publication.
OUR DIAGNOSTIC & DECISION SYSTEMBrand Clarity™
Six depth layers decide what a brand is really worth. Reporting doesn’t get past the surface.
The standard brand KPI dashboard: market share, volume growth, margin comp, CAC, awareness, and brand health report what has just happened—not the why, nor how stable those metrics are.
Brand Clarity—works the layers underneath, measuring the depth of your brand moat—inheritance, meaning, distinction, commercial architecture, availability, alignment, where brand equity is actually created and sustained.
Brand Clarity Index (BCI)—scores a brand against the six layers and reveals a small number of mutually exclusive paths, each costed against your own economics.
Brand Clarity Workshop—runs in-house with the entire leadership team in the room—set against a full diagnostic and a BCI score, to work through the strategic choices and agree which path to commit to one and stop funding the others. The workshop outcome is a decision to act, together.
To see how deep your brand moat is, you need Brand Clarity™ADVISORY SERVICESAdvisory follows a diagnostic and a decision to act.
Cowan & Associates works with FMCG and CPG leadership teams to turn a chosen path into an operating plan, and stays in the business while it is executed. Not a report and a handover. The same judgment that named the path, applied to the decisions that follow it.
We also advise investors and capital allocators on the true potential of an investment or acquisition target, and appraise the category it competes in.
Mandates are retained and deliberately selected. Where a business needs an operator rather than an advisor, we take interim executive roles.
BRAND CLARITY BRIEFINGSDiscover what really determines a brand’s success or failure.
Short, sharp reads on how consumer brands grow, stall, and exit, and what the pattern says about where the value sits.
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