Services

Today's innovative corporations are expanding on the role of their CSOs (Chief Sustainability Officers) to become more transformational in building growth strategies for green market leadership. As corporations continue to grow ever more complex, CSOs are increasingly becoming responsible for sustainability decisions related to corporate, product, and service brands which require being more agile in spanning corporate silos. This new reality demands that the CSO integrates sustainability decisions to bridge the gaps across the different silos of managing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESGs) to optimize sustainable performance. Therefore, the CSO increasingly stands at the forefront of ESG strategies and green initiatives.

Accurand developed the CSOutsider program to support senior corporate leaders in coordinating complex sustainability decisions (i.e., measuring, managing, reporting, and communicating) to create clear, consistent, and impactful strategies. Also, the CSOutsider supports senior executives of small and medium enterprises that don't have their CSO to coordinate a multifunctional ecosystem that provides sustainability reports for investors and other stakeholders. 

Further, the CSOutsider program can be helpful for companies that are in the entry phase of foreign market entry and need corporate briefings on entity formation, expansion, and growth to meet country sustainability standards. 

Partner Case

Sustainability Claims of Natural Food Brands
and Nutritional Supplements 

The U.S. natural foods and nutritional supplements cluster is very lucrative. The dietary and nutritional supplements market is estimated at $40 billion, while the raw food segment has reached $70 billion. We offer an integration of cutting-edge brand strategy frameworks to help access and dominate the market's B2B and B2C segments with robust private-label manufacturing and brand merchandising support services. Our consulting team has over 30 years of experience in the U.S., addressing the most demanding global marketing and brand strategy challenges. Currently, Accurand is coaching award-winning entrepreneurs (founders, owners, and operators) who are entering the market for the first time with innovative, healthy, 100% all-natural gourmet products.

At Accurand, we have firsthand experience preparing vendor applications for leading retailers such as Whole Foods, Wegmans, Giant Food, Harris Teeter, Aldi, and Trader Joe's. We work closely with our clients to empower their brands by creating third-party verifications, developing packaging and labeling strategies, and preparing marketing plans. Also, our leadership team partnered with the nutrition division of a global leader in healthcare to offer the analysis of customer relationship management retail marketing. We made recommendations regarding how to align sustainability claims with customer experiences. 

We work closely with certified and accredited executive training and coaching partners to design and deliver custom-tailored programs for various industries. For example, we offer unique executive development programs for the banking industry to empower their SME clients in today’s disruptive environment, where corporate sustainability faces the challenge of meeting ESG standards. Only a few SMEs have vital sustainability programs that report on their performance. This executive program offers an awakening call to action in response to unmet needs and changes in the SME banking landscape. 

Also, we coach small and medium-sized companies through their business formation, expansion, and growth. The Accurand Academy conducted workshops and corporate retreats where we worked closely with our partners in administering our SustainabilityScorecard ™ to measure how their sustainability claims resonate in the marketplace regarding rating consistency, performance, and market impact. We help clients create strong sustainability cultural brands within the organization while aligning their service delivery models with the desirable market expectations. The Accurand Academy™ helped our partners in the following ways: 

· Managing the customer-brand engagement experience;

· Creating brand consistency in communicating the sustainability claims;

· Aligning brand design and management with relationship building;

· Assessing market demand structure in different sectors;

· Building effective contingency plans in the face of increasing uncertainty; 

· Discovering, connecting & seizing opportunities related to corporate vision, mission, and strategy.

Partner Case

Building Guest Engagement

Accurand pioneered the Guest Engagement Management (GEM) Index as a unique purpose-led brand positioning platform implemented in case projects like Tysons Galleria, a three-level enclosed 825,000-square-foot luxury retail center located in McLean, VA. This mall is at the center of a two million-square-foot mixed-use development; the center’s footprint includes an attached 398-room Ritz-Carlton hotel. It features more than 90 luxury specialty retailers and restaurants anchored by Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, and Saks 5th Avenue. This case project for the Tysons Galleria provided a detailed ServiceScape analysis that included an interception study and brand strategy recommendations for destination marketing communications.  

Helping clients grow beyond traditional markets requires using SustainabilityScorecard ™ by Accurand to target younger, more technologically savvy millennials. For example, top luxury destinations are forging a partnership with American Express to maximize the use of AMEX’s “My Life, My Card” template for new internet video content. Also, using celebrity endorsers helped in adding charisma to the destination brand while creating socially conscious market ads to increase viewer’s attention by using the tagline “It’s My Pleasure” in a way that switched attention from the functional attributes of the brand to an image of a “Smart Destination Brand.” Millennial consumers have a strong interest in receiving instant gratification through digital technology, such as wearable devices like wristbands for on-demand access to hyper-local communication messages and for gaining admission to local attractions in ways that offer seamlessly integrated personalized customer experiences.

Beacons intelligently deliver hyper-local communication messages by measuring the proximity of a traveler to the beacon itself. This helps city destinations and retail brands ensure the relevance of paid communications. Also, it helps in aligning the brand with the Omnichannel user. Millennial consumers are particularly attracted to multi-screen communications to gain instant access to information on special promotions and search for reviews on the environmental and social impact of the brands purchased.

Partner Case

Destinations with Purpose 

We worked closely with leading clients that own and operate mixed-use mega facilities, including major hotels, shopping outlets, and premier resort destinations like National Harbor, Maryland, including the Tanger Outlets and MGM National Harbor Hotel & Casino. In this case, Tanger built a solid strategic intent on implementing Omnichannel communications to strengthen the brand’s social responsibility messages embodied in its TangerCares campaign. Also, the city of National Harbor is located along the Potomac River just south of Washington; DC is a multi-use waterfront development of 350 acres being positioned as a premier environmentally sustainable urban community with significant green buildings, hotels, and tourist attractions like the internationally acclaimed LEED Gold certified MGM Casino Resort.  

In today’s disrupted market, where revenue sources are increasingly becoming scarce, navigating operational turbulences requires organizational agility driven by intelligence to deliver exceptional outcomes. Agile Operations by Accurand harnesses the use of cutting-edge technologies to span organizational silos and optimize the organic interaction of humans with processes and technologies to help clients authentically connect their services, products, and destinations with their customer/ visitor experiences to drive sustainable growth.

Accurand offers operational road maps and action plans that integrate customer/ visitor experiences to maximize results and long-term gains for all stakeholders (i.e., investors, operators, tenants, municipalities, destination management organizations, local communities, etc.). Every significant agile operation starts with creative “fresh thinking” before mapping out the action planning process. Thus, developing and executing operational plans requires a solid commitment to work collaboratively with all of the client’s stakeholder groups to achieve extraordinary results that stimulate the heart and soul of the client’s organization in an agile way.

Partner Case

Thriving Smart City Hub

The prevailing image of Tysons, Virginia, as a suburban shopping destination (on the outskirts of Washington, DC) threatened by the rise of online commerce is becoming a reality. For a long time, Tysons was perceived as a shopping destination with two top-ranked malls closely located to each other. The “beyond-shopping” image of Tysons required collaborative efforts between the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Council of Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Tysons Partnership to create a Business Improvement District (BID) that envisions an eco-smart hub in Northern Virginia. Thus, Tysons is transitioning from a suburban shopping destination to an emerging technology hub, green mobility, and logistics hub. This initiative to develop an Eco-Smart City Hub in Tysons required integrated marketing efforts to communicate a sustainability brand messaging that aligns with the strategic intent of creating “America’s Next Great City.” This major infrastructural transformation led to population changes (60% under 40 years old), creating a high-growth urban community in Tysons.