Strategy

Are your competitors talking about you in their boardrooms? Does your strategy guide how you allocate resources? At Bain, we see strategy as much more than a plan. Since Bain's founding in 1973, strategy has been our core business. We work with companies in every industry to develop strategies that deliver results.

What we do

Bain's strategy experts help clients with their most complex strategic challenges and build tailored solutions to help them achieve sustained growth. Bain emphasizes mobilization from day one—we begin by helping clients choose where to focus in order to out-execute and out-invest their competition, and ultimately generate higher returns.

Our areas of strategy consulting expertise include:

  • Fundamentals of growth: Only one in 10 companies succeeds in achieving sustained growth. We help companies grow by defining and focusing on their core.
  • Business unit strategy: Effective BU strategy requires making proprietary decisions on where to play and how to win. The goal is to drive a business to full economic potential.
  • Corporate strategy: Corporate strategy involves a proprietary set of actions that enables a company to be worth more than just the sum of its parts. The most critical role of the center is to help its business units achieve leadership positions.
  • BothBrain® Innovation: Bain works with clients to combine creative and analytic approaches to transform innovation for new product development and across the full customer experience.
  • Emerging markets: Home to most of the world’s population and growing at double-digit rates, emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe represent a must-win area for multinational companies. Bain helps companies navigate this unfamiliar terrain, competing against other multinationals and indigenous companies.
  • Sustainability: Bain helps companies develop renewable energy policies, realize the full potential of recycling processes, and identify the impact of trends and regulations, among other agendas.
  • Workshops: The strategy practice has a series of off-the-shelf workshops to help clients brainstorm opportunities, prioritize strategic options, and identify and discuss strategic needs and potential pitfalls.
How we help

For more than 30 years, Bain's superior capabilities have helped thousands of clients in every industry develop and deliver winning strategies.

  • We see things others miss, offering you more creative solutions that combine deep geographic experience, intimate sector knowledge and clear insights into how to create value in business.
  • We work collaboratively, build lasting capabilities into your team and help your organization mobilize for change.
  • We define our success by your results, we enjoy our work and have fun doing it, and we care deeply about our clients as people.

Bain believes that all value-driving strategies must:

  • Target sustained value creation through leadership in chosen markets and segments
  • Be based on a robust definition of boundaries between markets, discovered through correctly analyzing cost and customer sharing
  • Understand a company's position in the "F-E-R" growth cycle: focusing to achieve core full potential, expanding through adjacencies, or redefining the core
  • Clearly define which leadership model to pursue: cost, differentiation or industry influence
  • Involve the choice of whether to play by or to challenge the established industry rules of the game
  • Define repeatable models that allow you to win again and again
  • Identify what it will take to win in terms of organization and capabilities
  • Be dynamic and flexible, with contingency plans for reacting to leading indicators of external changes
  • Be implementable: that is, be achievable, affordable and focused
  • Translate into action and drive to results
Client results
We share our clients' ambitions. We work to understand their reality and deliver true results—focusing on strategic decisions and practical actions. And we align our incentives with our clients' objectives, so they know we're in it together. Read the results stories below to learn how we've helped clients realize, and often exceed, their objectives.
Insights
We develop insights that work for our clients. Our approach and recommendations are highly customized and lead to practical actions. Below is a selection of our experts' perspectives on important issues—for our clients and their industries. Visit Bain Insights to read more.
View the comprehensive list of Bain's strategy publications.
Our team

We have a core group of senior strategy focused experts that we deploy across the globe. Bain has extensive corporate strategy experience in over 3,000 cases. We work as an integrated part of your team, from frontline to C-suite, to deliver true results and make the changes stick.

Our team

  • Chris

  • Chris Zook

    Leader of Bain's Global Strategy practice

    Amsterdam

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  • James

  • James Allen

    Leader of Bain's Global Strategy practice

    London

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  • Ouriel

  • Ouriel Lancry

    Leader of Bain's Americas Strategy practice

    Chicago

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  • James

  • James Hadley

    Leader of Bain's EMEA Strategy practice

    London

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  • Nicolas

  • Nicolas Bloch

    Leader of Bain's EMEA Strategy practice

    Brussels

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  • Dunigan

  • Dunigan O'Keeffe

    Leader of Bain's Asia Pacific Strategy practice

    Mumbai

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In addition to the leaders above, we have an extensive and diverse team of experts ready to serve the needs of clients worldwide.