MECE Case Structure Example. This is something that we are often asked about
in our case interview workshops, that we do on campuses at over sixty campuses
around the world. And this is something that I think would be really helpful for
you to understand. So I've prepared a prompt as well as an example, of two
kinds of structures. One that is MECE, and one that is not. Just to give you an
idea of what it means to have a MECE case structure. The prompt is just a
basic business story. It's a colleague of mine and a friend who now has launched,
what is the fastest growing organic deodorant in the country. It's made largely
from charcoal, and you have to apply it in a stick format. And they just recently
were adopted at Target as one of their entrant points for retail. So this is a
really exciting growth plan for them. Right now they're in the United States
and they're doing about twenty million dollars in revenue. But they're
interested in international expansion. And our goal is to help them think about
that as the consulting firm. So you're gonna get this in a case, just as
an aside, this is a pretty clear market entry case. And the structure that we're
gonna use just to demonstrate what a MECE structure looks like, it's not
the only structure that you could use to solve it. But the fundamentals are: this
is a pretty small business, at twenty million in revenue, they have a consumer
product, it's a new product in a niche segment, and they're interested in not
market expansion in their current market, but actually overseas market expansion
which is a market entry framework. We're going use for this one the market study
framework from Management Consulted. And that has five standard pieces to it that
you can use or not use as you're thinking about it. So the first one, a non MECE
framework, I'm just gonna talk through five of the key areas. The first one is
the market. The second are competitors. The third are customers.
The fourth is the company and its' capabilities. And the fifth is the
product. In this case when we think about those five areas, there are some that
could naturally overlap. And I'm going to
demonstrate how you can make the mistake of letting them overlap. In market, for
example, you could look at data that includes the fragmentation of the market.
That's a pretty clear overlap with a competitor segment. You could also look
at the market share breakdown, inside the market. That's also an overlap of the
competitors segment. And you could look at market growth rates, which is not an
overlap. When you go to the competitor segment, you could talk about how market share
has changed over time. That's a different data point but it's still overlaps with
what you talked about inside the market. In addition, you could talk about
relative market share. And even though we talked about fragmentation before,
relative market share is going to use similar data. So again, that's one key
area where you could have some overlap. In addition for customers if you said
the overall growth rate of customers using the product, that could be a little
bit similar to what you looked at inside the market category. And we could keep
going, but it's not necessary to demonstrate that this is an issue.
Especially in these first three categories, when you're thinking about
market, and you're talking about competitors, they're thinking about
customers. Fundamentally when you sum up all the customers in a market, then they
add up to the market in total. And when you fundamentally sum up all the
competitors that are selling in the market, not their total revenues, but the
revenue in this segment, then you get the market. So these could be some naturally
overlapping buckets. And you're not going to be able to be MECE or mutually
exclusive and collectively exhaustive by using them. So in contrast, if you wanted
to solve this problem using a structure that was more MECE, you want to make
sure that you don't have any overlap in data. And the key way to do that is
to think about the market as a whole, and then to think about just the competitor
breakdown, and the customer breakdown. So just to exemplify that, we want to
identify the growth rate of markets outside of the US, that are top-ten
markets. We want to identify the size in revenues of markets outside the US. And
we want to identify regulatory concerns about entering new products in markets
outside of the US. We want to be very specific
that we were thinking only about the macro market, and not about customers, or
about competitors in those markets. Secondarily we want to think about the
dominance in the competitors bucket of certain areas. We want to think
about market share by market, of key international global players. It's likely
by the way that this kind of product would be ripe for acquisition by a large
multinational company, like Procter & Gamble. So we want to identify what their
market share was in key markets. If one of their key market share areas was
Germany, we might want to enter Germany first. And we want to be really specific
that were thinking about the competitor bucket in terms of the future plan for
the business. We also might want to identify fragmentation of cross current
markets. We might want to identify the growth rate of competitor products. We
might want to identify three key features of competitor products, such as
their price, their brand positioning, and their marketing strategy. When we would go
over to customers, we want to make sure that we weren't thinking about the
market as a whole, but we're thinking about customer segments. Who are the
three major customer segments that are buying these products. What are the age
demographics of the customer segments. We really want to make sure that we
identify what customer segments are being used, inside those areas. And you
don't want to roll it back up to the market. So as you're going through your
interview process, make sure in a situation like this or any others that
you come across, that you're being MECE. That you're not overlapping any of your
categories. You don't have to worry as much in cases about being the "C", the
collectively exhaustive, it's not as important. But being mutually exclusive
is key to efficiency in solving case interviews. We hope that you enjoyed this
video on being MECE in case interview structure. If you have questions about
case interview structuring we would love to help. And we do reviews of case
interview structures as well as we have structured drills on the website. So
please make sure you check out everything that we have for you at
www.managementconsulted.com.