The Challenge
The Marshall Group is a audio, tech and design powerhouse uniting musicians and music lovers through genre-breaking innovation and doing things differently than the industry standard. The Marshall Group today is a combination between Marshall Professional, the leading music audio pioneer, and Zound Industries, who were responsible for the consumer audio business.
Zound Industries started in 2008 as a consumer electronics company in audio devices, focusing on innovation and technology. Over the years, Zound grew into a global company with its headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden and offices throughout Europe, The United States, and Asia. The company offered a wide range of iconic and award-winning audio electronic products through its three consumer-facing brands: Marshall, Urbanears, and Adidas Headphones.
Since its inception, Zound Industries was able to realize solid growth until it reached a plateau around 2020. At this point, Zound was looking to revitalize the business and achieve growth again. One key step was the appointment of a new CEO, Jeremy de Maillard, in October of 2020. Jeremy started by redefining the vision and mission of Zound Industries and Marshall. Next, was an overhaul of the strategy needed to realize that vision.
Marshall teamed up with Alexandra and Nextrday in early 2021 to redefine and finalize its strategy, translate strategy to execution via strategy-to-execution planning, or OGS(T)M, communicate and cascade the strategy throughout the entire organization, and achieve the desired results in the market. The goal was to inspire everyone and ultimately align the organization towards the same goals.
“In 2021, we were on a mission to (re-)establish Marshall as the most exciting alternative to traditional players in consumer electronics.
Alexandra and Nextrday supported us with finetuning our strategy and bringing it to life across the entire organization, using workshops, events and digital tools.
This has formed the basis for Marshall’s stellar growth today. I would recommend working with Alexandra and Nextrday to any leader looking to translate strategy to execution.”
Jeremy de Maillard
CEO, The Marshall Group
The Process
The whole project spanned about a year, starting in May of 2021. To successfully achieve the ambitious goals set out by Zound Industries, or the Marshall Group as they are called today, the project was divided into three phases: strategy creation, strategy execution planning, and cascading and roll out of the strategy.
First, a full organizational deep dive was performed, to understand Marshall’s strengths and weaknesses as well as to identify the opportunities and threats in the market. With all these insights, we organized a series of workshops with the management team to finetune the overall strategy, make choices and outline the strategy-on-a-page. This overall strategic framework contained the where-to-play and how-to-win choices, with five clear ambitions supported by a set of enablers.
With the strategic framework finished, it was time to define how this strategy would be executed. At Nextrday, we use the OGSTM method to define a successful framework for strategy execution planning. In this phase, we translate the strategy into clear initiatives and tactics, with actions, owners and deliverables. At The Marshall Group, a wider selection of people were involved in a series of engaging events and interactive workshops, both online as well as in person. The strategy execution plans that followed were encompassing of all departments, broke down silos, and highlighted interdependencies.
With the plan fully developed, it was time to announce and launch the strategy to the entire organization. This wasn’t just done with an internal email, the Marshall Group team took the opportunity to make launching the strategy into a full-blown team building event. The strategy was launched with a full week of activities and workshops, including, of course, some bands playing music!
Launching the work
Finally, after the launch, now everyone in the organization was involved. To successfully communicate and cascade the strategy and execute on it, a simple digital solution was designed, using Monday.com. This ensured one source of truth where every team member could outline and work against their individual objectives, aligned with the overall Marshall strategy. Additionally, the digital tool allowed for tracking of progress of each action, initiative and strategy, seeing who else was involved, and being able to identify any issues in advance. This helped Marshall to remain agile and make any tweaks to the overall strategy as needed.
The results
All in all, by finetuning their strategy and creating a clear OGTSM execution framework, The Marshall Group was able to:
A full transformation; ready to scale
In 2022, by executing its redefined strategy, The Marshall Group found impressive, sustainable growth again. 2023 exceeded 2022 with even better results. Altogether, Marshall was able to double their business in just a few years, an impressive result and an achievement that underscores the importance of an inspiring vision, supported by integrated strategy creation and strategy execution efforts.
Now the Marshall Group
Furthermore, in 2023, Zound Industries was able to fully acquire the Marshall brand, including the professional audio segment. The combination is now called The Marshall Group and in a very strong position for long term, sustainable success.
“Any company, large or small, can achieve long-term, sustainable growth. It ‘just’ takes a clear vision, solid strategic choices and then a relentless focus on execution.”
Alexandra van der Stap
Nextrday
