Strategic Co-Creation · a case from the co-creation research
A German financial brokerage built its whole business on co-creating something far larger than a financial plan: the customer’s professional life.
Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens — Future of Selling research programme
The model
MLP Group is one of the largest financial advisory firms in the German retail market, with thousands of self-employed brokers across hundreds of branches. Its clients are university-educated professionals — doctors, lawyers, economists, scientists, engineers, academics. The firm chose these groups deliberately, because they share high future earning potential and attractive risk profiles. But the way MLP wins and keeps these clients is not by being the best at selling financial products. It is by helping the client build the career that will eventually generate the financial decisions.
A young professional about to take a recruitment test for their first serious job does not know how to prepare for it. An MLP advisor offers to help — without charging, without selling a financial product, without asking the client to sign anything. When a self-employed doctor or lawyer wants to sell their practice, MLP’s network helps find a buyer and brokers the transaction. Because each branch specialises in a particular professional group, the advisors accumulate deep industry knowledge and can give career advice as readily as financial advice. The financial products the client eventually buys — pensions, asset management, insurance — follow from a relationship that was built around the client’s professional trajectory.
Co-creating the strategy, not selling the product
The co-creation here is strategic in the literal sense. MLP and the client work together on the client’s plan for their professional life: which job to take, when to move into self-employment, how to value and sell a practice, how to think about the long arc of a career in their profession. The advisor brings knowledge of the profession’s typical paths, the financial structures that support each stage, and a network of others in the same field. The client brings their ambitions, their constraints, and their judgement about their own life. Neither could build the client’s financial strategy well without the career strategy underneath it, and the career strategy is co-created.
This is what makes it Strategic Co-Creation rather than consultative selling. A consultative seller helps the customer choose the right product for a need the customer already has. MLP helps the customer shape the need itself, by helping them shape the career from which all their future financial needs will flow. The financial plan is downstream of a strategy the advisor helped create. That is a different and deeper relationship than product selling, however consultative, can reach.
How the firm sustains it
Strategic Co-Creation of this kind takes years to pay off, and the MLP model is built to carry that long horizon. The brokers are self-employed and work on commission. A new broker spends their first years building a portfolio of young clients whose immediate financial commitments are modest — which means the broker is co-creating careers long before those careers generate much revenue. The model bets the early years against the later ones: a twenty-five-year-old client is not yet profitable, but the same person at fifty, with assets to manage and a retirement to plan, is among the most valuable clients in retail finance.
To make this work, MLP aligns its branch managers to the new broker’s success by having them co-finance each recruit’s training, turning the manager into a stakeholder in whether the recruit survives the difficult early years. The narrow client focus — high-earning professional groups — is the other counterweight, ensuring that the careers being co-created today become the valuable financial relationships of tomorrow. The whole architecture exists to let the firm afford the patience that Strategic Co-Creation requires.
The honest qualifier is that the patience is expensive and the attrition is real. Many brokers start; fewer survive the first years. The model works in aggregate even when it does not work for every individual. That is the price of building a business on co-creating something as slow-maturing as a career, and it is a price not every firm can pay.
What the case teaches about Strategic Co-Creation
The first lesson is that the object of co-creation can be the customer’s own direction. MLP does not co-create a product with its clients; it co-creates the strategy — the career — from which the client’s needs will later emerge. A supplier who can help a customer shape where they are going earns a position no product seller can reach, because the supplier is present at the formation of the need, not merely at its satisfaction.
The second lesson is that Strategic Co-Creation runs on a long horizon, and the firm’s economics have to be designed for it. The value of co-creating a customer’s strategy accrues over years, sometimes decades. A firm that needs the relationship to pay off this quarter cannot do it. MLP’s tied-agent model, for all its harshness, is an honest attempt to fund a business whose returns arrive late. Any supplier contemplating Strategic Co-Creation has to answer the same question MLP answered: how will we afford to be patient?
The third lesson is that helping the customer succeed is the mechanism, not a slogan. MLP wins financial business because it genuinely makes its clients more successful in their professions — better prepared, better connected, better advised about their careers. The financial revenue is the consequence of the client’s success, not the goal pursued at the client’s expense. Strategic Co-Creation only works when the supplier’s interest in the customer’s success is real, because a customer can tell the difference between a partner shaping their strategy and a seller steering it.
About this case. This case is drawn from the Future of Selling research programme led by Prof. dr. Régis Lemmens (Solvay Brussels School / AMS Antwerp Management School) and Prof. dr. Javier Marcos (Cranfield School of Management), and was documented in From Selling to Co-Creating (Lemmens, Donaldson and Marcos, 2014); the underlying MLP case study was developed by Anderson and Kupp (2008) at ESMT. It illustrates Strategic Co-Creation — the form of co-creation in which a supplier helps the customer develop their own vision and strategy. Here the strategy co-created is the customer’s career. A companion Strategic Co-Creation case is Salomon FoodWorld, which co-creates restaurants’ menus. To follow the research, visit futureofselling.eu.
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