Digital Evaluation

With digital impacting so many components of a business (from go-to-market strategies and position to internal organizational capabilities), it’s critical to have an objective view of how exactly your business stacks up. Regardless of whether you are a consumer brand, media conglomerate, healthcare system or industrial goods provider, knowing where your business is — starting by identifying strengths, weaknesses and risks — can surface opportunities that drive further differentiation or catch-up where needed.

Assessing your digital reach, channels, product portfolio and capabilities in comparison with competitors in your industry and analogues in other industries can provide a useful starting point. This benchmarking identifies gaps that may need to be filled and opportunities to drive sustainable competitive advantage. The assessment takes into account not only a business’s own digital properties but also presence and perception across third-party and social media channels.

How We Help

We evaluate the digital health of your organization and find ways to improve it. As part of that, we can help you:

• Benchmark your positioning across the go-to-market strategy/customer life cycle (e.g., channel ecosystem; strength of digital voice; experience; and offering by channel, by share and by quality of digital voice and shelf)
   
• Identify your company’s experiential and executional strengths and weaknesses across all key dimensions (e.g., customer engagement, delivery, operations)
   

• Evaluate your digital footprint across all channels — both the ones you own and the ones on which your organization is talked about

• Assess the strength of your digital portfolio — from digitally enhanced legacy products to new data platforms and applications

• Identify your key gaps and opportunities in the marketplace

• Benchmark your organizational talent and design to determine readiness to execute on a digital strategy (e.g., allocation and prevalence of tech resources)

• Evaluate the digital assets of a potential acquisition in order to identify areas of strength or opportunity

Your Benefits

• Know where your company has gaps to fill or has opportunities to make the most of a differentiated advantage over your competitors
   
• Identify, in order of importance, solutions your organization needs to invest in to get ahead of or catch up with the competition
   
• Create and deploy solutions faster

Successes

• A home goods retailer recognized digital was changing consumers’ expectations of the shopping experience, but its business was organized around the physical store. L.E.K. Consulting was engaged to articulate a consumer-centric digital innovation vision and identify the client’s key capability gaps to achieve its digital objectives. After defining the four primary digital objectives, including strategies such as a single view of the customer, personalized marketing, omnichannel customer service and seamless multichannel experience, we along with the client evaluated functional capabilities and determined the key initiatives needed to close the digital gap. The result was a clear roadmap of activity that led to successful implementation of the client’s digital vision.
   
• A leading supplier in the semiconductor market developed an innovative online B2B marketplace for standardized thermal components (e.g., sensors, heaters, rods) but needed a greater understanding of its market in order to capitalize on the solution’s potential value. We analyzed the market and value chain dynamics and formulated a roadmap prioritizing opportunities, significantly improving the knowledge base across five business units leading to board alignment on a go-forward strategy.
   
• A professional sports league operated a legacy television business and needed to complement its licensing contracts with broadcasters globally. The organization had built a material digital business, but that business operated in its own silo with very little leverage of core media assets and significant redundancy. Both parts of the business were operating below their potential on fan experience and economics. We helped the client audit the current organization and identify a new structure and the accompanying roles and processes to break down the legacy silos and shift to an agile digital-first organization that better leveraged its strengths and talent.
   
• A global HVAC manufacturer was evaluating a potential strategic partnership with a provider of “smart” building automation technologies. As building systems were becoming more integrated, with the potential to provide increased efficiency and sustainability for building owners, access to building automation platforms was emerging as a significant differentiator and a way to achieve greater client engagement. We assessed the building automation technology market, identifying how the latest generation of systems were integrating building services, and whether the target partner could provide sufficient future value for the client.
   
• A multibanner direct-to-consumer women’s apparel company was looking to facilitate its next stage of growth and needed a fact-based assessment of the market, consumer dynamics and competitive landscape. As part of the fact base, we conducted a detailed diagnostic of the brand sites’ ecommerce performance relative to key competitors, including in traffic, user experience and engagement, speed, accessibility, and search performance.
   
• A private equity investor was considering the acquisition of a leading online retailer of outdoor and home products. In addition to evaluating the target’s market size and growth, customer dynamics, value proposition, competitive landscape and overall growth potential, we conducted a deep assessment of its ecommerce capabilities. Key metrics included traffic volume and sources, site performance, and an evaluation of user experience, all compared to best practices and competitors.
   
• A national big box sporting goods retailer was looking to transform its small ecommerce business into a growth platform for the organization. We determined the most strategically and economically attractive options for front-end and back-end platforms by clearly defining the go-forward digital vision and its technical requirements. The end result was an operating model expected to drive an 800-basis-point improvement in operating margins with better service levels to our client’s customers.