Evaluation of sales cooperation as potential growth lever for tesa Consumer & Craftsmen : elaboration of a cooperation strategy, screening criteria and first qualification case of potential partners

Abstract

After a constant profitable growth in the past years, tesa Consumer & Craftsmen, the B2C-branch of tesa SE, is facing big challenges in the next years. Adhesive market related channels are not going to show any significant growth within the next years except for Eastern Europe. In countries with low tesa market shares, there is no sales growth due to dominant local brands (Scotch, Sellotape, Plasto). In countries with high tesa market shares, there is no growth without new products/categories. And private labels / trade labels tends to gain market shares. Up to now the strategic focus lied on organic growth through market penetration and product innovations. Even if the innovation pipeline was successfully filled and some new markets entered, past activities showed three main challenges for tesa in order to enter new markets and to grow more successfully and more sustainably: the identification of more breakthrough innovations based on even more fundamental, in-depth user, trend and technology know how, the capability to develop new products even beyond tesa's core competencies, the penetration of relevant target groups and sales channels even with limited market share and resources. Sales cooperation have already been a relevant topic for tesa. But from now on, tesa's board wants to switch from a relatively pragmatic to a more strategic and pro-active approach of cooperation. Therefore the advantages, chances but also conditions of sales cooperation as lever for growth have to be investigated and concretized strategically as well as potential partnerships have to be screened and qualified actively. According to this the main objective of the following master thesis is the evaluation if and how sales cooperation are appropriated, the elaboration of a sales cooperation strategy for tesa and the definition of the relevant criteria, frameworks and partners landscape for the qualification of potential cooperation partners. The elaborated strategy and the defined criteria will enable tesa to identify and qualify potential sales cooperation partners in a systematic way. The systematic approach will open up new partnership opportunities, that would probably not have been identified by applying the pragmatic approach. Furthermore it enables a more efficient screening through fast rejection of sales cooperation that are "not on strategy" and a companywide uniform assessment of cooperation ideas. Finally the elaborated strategy and the respective frameworks will be applied on a concrete case, resulting in a potential map with sales cooperation partner recommendations for tesa.