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.
OUR DIAGNOSTIC & DECISION SYSTEMBrand Clarity™
Six layers decide how deep and defensible your brand's moat really is. Your current reporting doesn't get past the surface.
The standard brand KPI dashboard — market share, volume growth, margin, CAC, awareness, brand health — reports what happened. It doesn't report why, or whether those numbers will hold.
Brand Clarity measures the depth of your brand moat. Six layers — inheritance, meaning, distinction, commercial architecture, availability, alignment — show where brand equity is actually created and sustained.
The Brand Clarity Index (BCI) scores a brand against the six layers, then narrows the result to a small number of mutually exclusive paths — each costed against your own economics.
A Brand Clarity Workshop runs in-house with the entire leadership team in the room. Set against a full diagnostic and a BCI score, the team works through the strategic choices and agrees which path to commit to — and which to stop funding. The outcome is a decision to act, together.
To see how deep your brand moat is, you need Brand Clarity™BRAND DIAGNOSTICSThe factors driving your brand equity rarely show up in your KPI dashboard.
A Brand Diagnostic establishes what's creating brand equity and what's holding it back — then sets out which strategic choices are genuinely still available. We run three distinct diagnostic reports — the right one depends on where your brand sits in its lifecycle, and who's commissioning it.
BRAND INVESTMENT REPORTPre-Investment Diagnostic
Before capital is committed. It tests whether the brand supports the case being made for it, what the upside 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. It sets out 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. It's a full diagnostic read on the factors that caused the brand to fail or find an offramp — and the decisions that determined its fate.
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's executed, rather than handing over a report and leaving. The same judgment that named the path carries into the decisions that follow.
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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