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BWP believes the origins of growth (in your company’s favour) to lie in changes in the behaviour of target group majorities. Large-scale growth can only occur if a large number of customers, dealers, intermediaries, opinion leaders and investors change their characteristic ways of thinking and behaving.

Apart from classical business administration and modern marketing, sociobehavioural sciences explore the question of how human behaviour and changes in attitudes and behaviour function, and how these can be strategically influenced. This is one of BWP’s core competencies, which supplements our classical and well-known modern business strategies. The sociobehavioural approach helps us to identify innovative, offensive and mostly surprising new growth strategies. As we said: even in difficult market conditions or crises in the segment.

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How does human behaviour work? BWP uses the knowledge gained experientially by the modern behavioural sciences, which in the last decades have carried out tens of thousands of practical studies into this subject. The results are well-researched principles, laws and mechanisms which are today applied in many different areas of life by the great media and opinion leaders of this world. By top politicians and their strategists when preparing election campaigns and trying to gain the vote of the general public. By star attorneys who want to win over the jury and the public in major litigation proceedings. By psychologists and therapists who want to help their patients break out of old behavioural patterns and develop new ones.

Although strategies founded on behavioural sciences today already play a central role in many areas of life, they are used astonishingly little in business, management and marketing.

This is because business life is still dominated by the basic economic maxim that the primary aim of clients is to maximise personal benefit. From the perspective of the modern behavioural sciences, this is a very one-sided, simplistic and inadequate statement.

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In the mid-1990s, BWP began evaluating, structuring and categorizing the knowledge gained by the empirical behavioural sciences with the aim of working out the principles, mechanisms and laws which could be relevant and significant for business strategies. The result is a strategic “toolbox” which now contains more than 120 proven instruments of behavioural change. They have since been validated by more than 1600 case studies involving successful companies and brands from a wide variety of sectors and industries.

These instruments can be applied universally, as the ways in which the human mind controls behaviour are common to all target groups, sectors and cultures. The mind and the emotions always “work” in the same way – regardless of whether the person is deciding on a brand of lemonade, making a financial investment or, in the case of the medical profession, making a therapeutic decision about the life or death of a patient. This is why the instruments in our toolbox also work for all target groups, sectors and cultures.

More about our strategic approach

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These days, when managers develop their growth strategies, they usually view the market as a whole: with its segments, its competitive dynamics, its trends, its niches and its unexploited potential. Executives usually use this “big picture” to decide where the best growth opportunities are and to determine their targets for the coming years.

The added value of BWP lies in enriching this “macro” perspective by adding “micro” perspectives: we focus our attention on the “smallest unit” of growth, i.e. the specific situation in which the target groups are to change their behaviour, what drives and restricts their activity – and what strategic guiding ideas can be derived from this. In this way, we create an additional perspective which is practically always an enrichment for our clients: new insights and knowledge which make unexploited potential visible, inspire a general change of course, or constitute the platform of completely new growth concepts. This approach based on the behavioural sciences gives rise to innovative ideas, solutions and pathways to growth.

However, it is by no means our intention to supersede or supplant the traditional strategic approaches tried and tested by companies. We want to supplement them with an additional perspective which could give rise to completely new options and opportunities.

Our projects often begin with a “Strategic Review” – taking behavioural science insights into account. This means that we examine the growth or competitive strategy currently adopted by the company with an eye to whether it is strong enough to bring about behavioural changes on a larger scale. As a rule, we can pinpoint ways to improve the strategy – or we recommend a whole new growth course and demonstrate why this is better.

The strategic review is followed by strategic development: here we present a variety of expedient methods substantiated by behavioural science describing how the company can deliberately influence the thoughts, attitudes and behaviour patterns of its diverse target groups (also business-to-business, traders, experts, opinion leaders and journalists).

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1. Specialised core competence
There are many consulting companies, but only a very few define “market-oriented growth strategies” as their core competence – at senior management level.

We are not one of the general service providers who are able or attempt to satisfy all consulting needs. However, our avowed aim is to be one of the best in our specialized area of expertise, also in international comparison. With regard to our core competence, we want to influence prevalent thinking; for this we recruit top talents as partners and consultants, for this we develop innovative methods and concepts. We want our headstart in this competence to be tangible in every project and to act in our clients’ interest.

2. Consultants with their own management experience in industry and commerce
A consulting company is only ever as good as the consultant or consulting team in charge of a particular project. BWP does not employ junior consultants or people new to the profession, but only Marketing Strategy Consultants with years of management experience in first-class companies such as Procter&Gamble. All of our consultants have personally controlled and managed brands, experienced market dynamics at first hand and made strategic decisions on their own responsibility. We have all been responsible for budgets and managed organisations. This first-hand experience helps us to structure our projects efficiently and to take staff and management from various departments on board even in complex organisations.

3. Scientifically proven instruments
Since the early 1990s, BWP has been working on making brand management more calculable and predictable by implementing innovative, scientifically proven approaches. The focal point is our own comprehensive research project: the BWP Brand Research Project. The idea is to understand the success of winning brands in various segments using explanatory models from the behavioural sciences (“What motivates human behaviour – and what are the principles on which changes in human behaviour are based?”), and to draw conclusions which can be used in practice. In this context, our main concern is to increase the probability of success of brand strategies, and thus to hedge marketing investments.

4. A solid track record of success covering many years
BWP has extensively documented case studies from its own consulting practice, giving significant – and sometimes dramatic – evidence of our contribution to the success of companies ranging from SMEs to large companies, across sectors, in Germany and throughout Europe.

Examples: the revenues generated by an anti-thrombosis drug (already the market leader at that time) rose from 40 million Euro to 195 million Euro in just under five years thanks to the implementation of a new strategy (with the product left unchanged). A European telecommunications provider increased its customer base fivefold within three years. Through implementing a new strategy, an insurance product brand serviced by us has been recording growth in double figures for the last ten years – twice the market rate.

Of course, the aim of a consultation is not always to make spectacular flights on the market, but usually to achieve sustained, continuous growth. At the same time, we point out that our case studies are invariably the result of successful cooperation between client and consultant. However, most projects have one thing in common: they come into being in difficult market and competitive conditions, in times of strategic uncertainty. These are the times that we as external specialists can offer the greatest added value.

5. Entrepreneurial pragmatism
Our philosophy is so simple that we can describe it in three short sentences:
We feel responsible for the success of our recommendations. We invariably act is if we ourselves were managers, partners, owners or investors in the company we are looking after. Our recommendations reflect the way we ourselves would act if we were part of the company.
This is our standard. This is what we measure ourselves against. And this is one of the main reasons why many clients come back to BWP again and again.

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