The approaches taken by many research and consultancy firms in the past have, in many cases, not really assisted the client companies, but have ended up accumulating unnecessary data on their systems. The client companies are left with a lot of data and analysis, but no real concrete and actionable plans. This is where we believe Un-3 Consulting makes a huge difference. Our unique process delivers quality data, deep insights and creative action plans that make a significant impact on the client’s business.
Un-3 Consulting brings to the table a unique skill set, with a team that combines the best of industry and academia; seasoned professionals with deep and broad expertise from the areas of strategy, brand management, marketing research and analytics. This provides clients expertise at all three levels – operational, inferential and strategic.
We start with a unique offering – a free one week audit of our client’s business. The output of this exercise is typically the identification of key issues and priorities that would make the most impact on the client’s business. Only if the client is happy with this work do we get into a financial contract and take it forward.
Creating a customer-centric business is the mantra of Un-3 Consulting. We do not believe in templatized solutions that so many consultancies offer, as we believe that each client faces unique situations and has unique needs, and therefore the approach of a consultant has to be flexible enough to customize solutions to these needs. To this end, our inputs start at the earliest stage with the free audit, where we challenge all assumptions and pre-conceptions to identify the actual root causes of the issues that the client faces. Our firm assembles and integrates data from various sources into significant insights, which then creates a tremendous impact on the businesses of our clients.
We follow a simple and effective process that has been proven to deliver strong insights and unique solutions. The process starts by asking the right questions and searching for internal information to find answers to the questions. Many times, the answers to these questions are already present within the client organization, though hidden in the forest of data that the managers of the organization need to cut their way through to run the business. For the unanswered questions, we both suggest and implement approaches to help fill the gaps in information. This is followed by integrating all the information to come up with strong insights into what are the actual issues that the client faces, and the opportunities that can be exploited. Using design thinking principles, we then come up with practical yet creative action plans that the client can implement to take their business up to the next level.
To this model, Jishnu is excited to add in the design thinking methodology. Many people don’t realize that Design Thinking is not simply about design. It is actually a very powerful and creative problem-solving tool that can be used across different aspects of a business. Jishnu believes that the combination of the customer and business insights and design thinking that Un-3 Consulting is now bringing to the table is a very powerful way to help businesses grow.
For, example there is this category which has a huge potential for innovation. And consumers are disposed to or expect innovation in the category. However, the brand that we consult for, has a brand name that has a huge emotional connect – just the name itself – to a particular sub-category or set of products only. The challenge was the likely (emotional) disconnect that the brand name would have with innovative offerings in other sub-categories. With extensive consumer inputs and internal brain-storming, we were able to come up with adaptations in the brand and call-names for the sub-categories so that we could minimize dissonance without having to spend huge sums on salience building.
Another example is one where brand extension possibilities were missed till the client actually engaged in extensive Consumer Immersions. This exercise exposed the client to various facets of their brand’s positioning and further resulted in interesting and creative line extension possibilities for the brand. Both the cases give us one lesson. Clients and their consultants must engage with their customers and consumers in deep and multi-faceted conversations; many dimensions to the business surface in such conversations, which the client may be blind-sided to due to their day-to-day business compulsions.
Unlike big firms working on the clock, we pride ourselves in going the extra mile for our clients, and the list of our clients who have continued to work with us year after year is testament to this commitment, as well as to the effectiveness of our solutions.
About the Author
Jishnu Changkakoti is an Independent Director at Un-3 Consulting firm. He is an alumnus of IIM Calcutta and NIT Calicut with over 24+ years of experience working with various companies such as Zydus, Samsung and Johnson & Johnson. He currently also works with startups, guiding them in the area of marketing and sales.
He is also passionate about teaching and mentoring young minds and is a highly ranked Adjunct Professor at IMT Ghaziabad and few other educational institutes.
Outside of his work, Jishnu is an avid photographer and travel enthusiast, with his own travel blog website. He has won a number of international awards for his photography and has also exhibited his photographs in a number of exhibitions.
