---
title: "The Pain of Growth: How to Kickstart Real Growth?"
description: "Kantar has identified several key factors causing the 'pain of growth' for companies, including copying past models, false innovation, market saturation, and organizational chaos. To address these, they propose a framework of seven cornerstones for initiating true growth."
author: "Samuel Cao"
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published: "2019-06-15"
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# The Pain of Growth: How to Kickstart Real Growth?

> Kantar has identified several key factors causing the 'pain of growth' for companies, including copying past models, false innovation, market saturation, and organizational chaos. To address these, they propose a framework of seven cornerstones for initiating true growth.

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Source: Brand Geometry (ID: brand-vista)

**The Pain of Growth: First, Trace Its Roots.**
Kantar has handled many client issues, which vary widely but ultimately boil down to the search for "how to grow." In their summaries, Kantar found that several major factors lead to the "pain of growth" for companies.

**Rise by Copying, Stuck by Copying**
China's rapid growth over the past few decades was partly due to copying the growth models of previous global or Western countries. If copying this model succeeded, it quickly scaled up, and at a certain stage, costs were compressed to increase profits. Many companies did this. But at the current stage in China, especially in the past two or three years, the copy model has begun to weaken. When traditional companies began to be impacted by emerging internet companies four or five years ago, the copy model basically stopped working.

**Fake Emerging, Real Traditional**
Some might say that some new companies are operating with completely different models, breaking principles and rules. In fact, many internet companies engage in price wars, subsidies, scale-up, and then mergers—still a scale war, which is also a traditional approach. Fake emerging, real traditional—just doing it on a new platform and in a new environment. But with development, everyone finds that the power of this model is also diminishing, and the barriers are getting higher.

**Market Matured, Consumers Ripened by the Internet**
Fifteen years ago, why did Western companies enter China? Because Western markets were mature, consumers were mature, and there was little room for growth. For example: over a decade ago, Unilever's tea beverages in Japan. A tea beverage had over a dozen different flavors; the market was mature, saturated, and competitive. So many European and American companies had to find new markets. At that time, for them, China's market share was not saturated, and consumers were not mature. They could enter and educate consumers to nurture their growth.

But times have changed. Almost all product categories are maturing, and Chinese consumers are also maturing, and very much so. The internet's information exchange allows consumers to buy whatever they want, so they encounter the same problems they faced in Western markets a decade ago. If they still cling to their current categories and markets, growth is out of the question.

So, companies must either redefine what their market really is, or jump out of their current markets and sail abroad.

**Organizational Chaos from Online and Offline**
With online and offline models, you inevitably see that this model disrupts the original order, and the current stage is a melee. Old order and new order coexist in chaos; everyone is still in the exploratory stage.

The traditional marketing department used to sell things and tell stories. They ran ads, watched the ratings, and expected conversions. Traditional sales just pushed products out. The connection between these two departments was not tight at all. Now, online and offline are integrated, boundaries are blurred, and it directly transitions to your final conversion rate or sales. Even e-commerce is a chain, and the original separate KPIs for each department no longer work.

Although boundaries between departments are blurring, most companies' organizational structures have not changed; marketing is still marketing, sales is still sales, so there will inevitably be discord and disputes over authority and responsibility. Many companies are deeply aware of the problem, but change requires great courage.

In addition, there are other issues that block "growth," but the ones mentioned above are more obvious and urgent.

So, in response to these issues, Kantar has conducted research and analysis in the new environment and proposed a framework to initiate true growth: the 7 Cornerstones.

**Three Cornerstones on "What to Do"**
**1. Break Boundaries**
Breaking boundaries means re-examining your industry. For example, a traditional company selling shampoo only looks at its market share in shampoo. Breaking boundaries means not just looking at shampoo, but at the hair care industry. If you expand the hair care industry further to the beauty industry, your market share becomes broader. You must shift from a seemingly unbreakable situation to gradually expanding, from focusing on explaining the past to investing in predicting the future.

**2. Multi-Dimensional Models**
When you start breaking boundaries, a problem naturally arises, especially when moving from one pie to another: you may need to enter a completely new business model, entirely different from before. This is linked to the internal organizational structure. For example, Coca-Cola originally sold raw syrup, but last year it bought Costa. The reason it bought Costa is that the carbonated beverage category is declining, so it needed to find a new pie. Coffee beverages are growing rapidly in the Chinese market, but the business model is quite different because Costa's model is a retail business model. Thus, Coca-Cola is moving forward with multiple models. Other companies should also break free from original thinking and try new models in parallel.

**3. Ultimate Experience**
Experience has always been a hot topic; now the market talks about nothing but experience. Everything is experience: your product is an experience, your service is an experience, and the process of users and consumers contacting and interacting is an experience.

But experience is actually of two types: one is the experience that satisfies existing pain points, which companies must do. The other is creating experiences.

Many consumers are not aware of their needs, but these needs are what truly drive growth. Take Mobike as an example. Before Mobike, no one thought it was a problem to walk a kilometer from the subway station to home, but the need to get home faster always existed. So when Mobike first came out, consumers felt the experience was great and stickiness was high.

Discovering consumers' vague needs and creating unprecedented experiences is the direction companies should strive for, and it is the real driver of growth.

**Three Cornerstones on "How to Do It"**
**1. Transformative Culture**
Corporate culture is part of a company; it may be unchangeable, deeply embedded in the company's "bone marrow." However, being unchangeable does not mean new elements cannot be added. One should learn from growth leaders, valuing innovation, change, and entrepreneurial spirit. IRG research data shows that growth laggards overemphasize "process," "structure," and "quality." Growth leaders, on the other hand, value innovation, change, and entrepreneurial spirit.

For example, Unilever did something: breaking cultural deadlock through external internalization.

Unilever buys many small startups, but the founders of these startups do not leave Unilever. Those founders remain within Unilever, regularly conducting workshops with Unilever's brand heads, colliding with internal brand managers, and helping more people understand the original purpose of the brand's startup. Unilever hopes to retain entrepreneurial thinking—what exactly is this entrepreneurial spirit, what did they do to succeed—and then internalize these contents as part of the culture.

**2. Agile Organization**
When your culture becomes diverse and rich, the single and inflexible organizational structure will also limit growth and performance. Internal advancement will either progress or regress; having multiple talents independently responsible for business workgroups is the trend.

A Chinese company that does this well is Haier.

Haier emphasizes innovation, and the corresponding organizational structure changes accordingly; all strategies and tactics change as well. In the past, Haier was seen as a home appliance seller. Most consumers may still think so, but Haier is no longer that. Haier has completely transformed into a platform, a strategic investment platform. It broke down the organizational structure, changing from hierarchical to flat. At the same time, it established the HOPE open innovation platform, where users, suppliers, and employees can express their opinions. Internal personnel can then seek opportunities and needs on this platform and conduct business and technical validation. If a need is proven feasible, they can propose to Haier to produce the product and also propose staffing requirements.

It can be seen that in this process, the concept of departments is broken; all personnel structures are established because of a need. A team is formed entirely new for a new product, with product sales as its KPI. The goal is very clear, and with its own investment, motivation is high.

**3. Whole-Brain Thinking**
Data can bring momentum, but numbers cannot solve everything.

Data may tell you where growth points are, but you must be able to induce that growth. This requires creativity and creative power to drive presentation and conversion.

For example, iQiyi's "The Golden Eyes." From script selection, big data is used to discover what the new generation likes in IPs, to mine key points for script adaptation, to gain insights into character settings, to select actors, and to design scenes, then processed and induced through creativity.

Like the human brain, half rational and half emotional, the left and right brains cooperate, combining data power and creativity. This is whole-brain thinking, which has the ability to attract and retain talent and will help companies reach the next level. In a whole-brain team, everyone is equal, and people with various specialties are not superior or inferior.

**One Indicator on "Results"**
**Human-Centric Growth**
Growth has many definitions: financial growth, short-term profit growth, or revenue growth. All growth, including changing definitions, changing services provided, and changing internal structures, ultimately serves "people." Here, "people" refers to users, employees, shareholders, and the communities where companies operate—all people affected by the company's operations.

Maslow's hierarchy tells us that when people satisfy basic needs, they naturally pursue higher realms. China's development is fast, and user maturity is accelerating, so building loyalty with "people" through simple product functions, service value, and benefit points will be difficult. Therefore, public welfare, humanities, and nature need to be involved. But simply doing public welfare or other content has limited meaning.

For example: Ant Forest. Planting trees and watering them online is simple. Based on public welfare, the company increases user stickiness, users feel corporate responsibility and contribute to public welfare enthusiasm, and it also affects the areas where trees are actually planted, further promoting corporate reputation and user growth.

So, human-centric growth ultimately achieves a positive cycle.


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