Bain & Company is one of the most prominent consulting companies in the world, along with McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Like the other two giants, Bain is known for presentations that frame issues, present data, and help companies to make important decisions. These qualities are rooted in several guiding principles Bain relies on to structure its decks.
Understanding the techniques behind Bain’s presentations can give you a powerful advantage if you ever build consulting decks yourself. And while most Bain decks are confidential, several have been released into the public domain. These precious examples offer us the only chance to deconstruct and learn from the consulting group’s methods.
Below, we’ve gathered up 30+ Bain presentation examples you can flip through, download, and analyze. We’ll also walk you through the slide creation strategies that make Bain’s presentations so effective.
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11 Bain industry overview presentation examples
These examples show how Bain builds slide decks that provide a detailed analysis of an industry or market. By flipping through these decks, you’ll see how information-rich the slides are — and how easy it is to absorb the data they present.
1. Bain/IAB Digital Pricing Research (2008)
2. 2011 China Luxury Market Study (2011)
3. Altagamma 2014 Worldwide Markets Monitor (luxury) (2014)
4. The Future of Luxury: A Look Into Tomorrow to Understand Today (2018)
5. Luxury and Coronavirus: Figures, Trends and CEO Agenda (2020)
6. Beauty@Digital - A study by Bain & Google (2016)
7. e-Conomy SEA 2019 - Swipe up and to the right: Southeast Asia's $100 billion Internet economy (2019)
8. e-Conomy SEA 2020 - At full velocity: Resilient and racing ahead (2020)
9. e-Conomy SEA 2021 - Roaring 20s: The SEA Digital Decade (2021)
10. Covid-19 Retail Webinar: Scenarios and Implications for Brazil (2020)
11. COVID-19 - Commercial Aviation: outlook and scenarios (2020)
10 Bain strategy and operations presentation examples
Bain’s strategy and operations presentations analyze their clients’ problems and make strategic recommendations. These examples give you an idea of how Bain makes evidence-based arguments to persuade its clients on a specific course of action.
12. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cost Diagnostic: Final Report (2009)
14. How to Accelerate Digital Solutions to Win in the New Normal (2020)
15. Procurement through COVID-19 (2020)
16. Covid-19: A Multimillion Results Journey through Operations Efficiency (2020)
17. The future of supply chain in a post-COVID world (2021)
18. Engaging your organization to deliver results (2019)
19. Pursuing a 5 Star Employee Experience (Unknown)
20. Stress Management at Bain (Unknown)
10 Bain problem-solving and case study presentation examples
These Bain presentations revolve around case studies, models, and forecasts. Case studies lend themselves well to creating a narrative arc, and the examples shine a light on Bain’s storytelling methods.
21. Covid-19: Chile's Consumer Pulse Update (2020)
22. Covid-19: Argentina's Consumer Pulse Update (2020)
23. Covid-19: Columbia's Consumer Pulse Update (2020)
24. COVID-19 Fact base and potential implications for Brazil (2020)
25. Covid-19: Brazil's Consumer Pulse Update (2020)
26. Covid-19: Situation Report and Action Agenda (2020)
27. Introduction to Bain & Company / Report on resilience (2021)
28. Employee Inspiration: How to Create Energy That Drives Better Customer Outcomes (2016)
29. School Start-up Plan: Overview and Instructions (Unknown)
30. Introducing Bain and the way we work: Presentation to FCEE-UCP (2007)
What makes Bain consulting decks so compelling
Bain consulting decks are so compelling for two reasons:
- They’re built around a persuasive storyline
- Their slides follow a structure that facilitates information delivery
Let’s see how Bain’s slide deck creators approach these two critical elements.
Building a persuasive storyline
Take any novel, short story, or film worth their salt — these forms of media draw you in, keep your attention for their duration, and leave a compelling impression thanks to a robust storyline.
Good consulting decks are no different. Leave the story out, and you’re just spewing data and leaving your audience with the tedious task of putting it together and drawing conclusions. On the other hand, a presentation in which ideas are organized in a cohesive narrative not only makes it easy for viewers to digest your arguments. It also captivates the spectators and gives you more power to persuade them.
Bain & Company know well the importance of incorporating a narrative arc into their presentations. If you take any Bain presentation, you’ll see that it follows the Situation-Complication-Question-Answer (SCQA) model to shape the story arc.
Example of Bain’s storytelling prowess
For example, consider Bain’s Luxury and Coronavirus: Figures, Trends and CEO Agenda presentation. In this deck, the Bain outlines the Situation — or the normal state of affairs in the luxury goods market — in the opening slides:
Then, comes the Complication. In these slides, Bain showcases the disruptive force of the COVID-19 pandemic on the luxury market across different regions:
Then come the questions. In these slides, Bain asks the audience to consider what direction the luxury goods market will take after the tremendous disruptions caused by COVID-19:
Finally, Bain’s viewers get the consulting group’s Answer, in the form of various forecasts for the future of the market:
Common elements found across all Bain consulting decks
Each of Bain’s presentations differs slightly in its storyline construction. However, these key elements are easily discernible across all of the consulting group’s decks:
- Informative and unambiguous title slide: Bain doesn’t waste time with vague titles. The first slide of every deck arrives at its point quickly, giving the audience a succinct but unambiguous message that neatly outlines the deck’s topic.
- Thorough executive summary: Bain’s executive summaries give the readers the key takeaways of the presentation up front. By presenting viewers with the “answers” first, it’s easier to create a cohesive narrative building up to the conclusion. With an executive summary in place, viewers can see how all the individual slides fit into the puzzle and end up straining less to see the big picture. Bain’s executive summaries often differ in format, but generally summarize the key messages of the deck:
- Graphic-packed body slides: Bain leans heavily on graphics to convey the main idea of a slide and support it with arguments and evidence. These graphics help viewers internalize the most crucial bits of information, and break up monotony of data.
Apart from Bain’s approach to shaping the storyline, the Bain’s decks also reveal the immense effort placed into ensuring a smooth contextual flow from the beginning to the end of the deck.
In the realm of presentation design, this strategy is called the “horizontal flow.” As one slide follows another on the screen, the viewers immediately see the connection between them; no slide is ever out of place, and no idea ever seems to appear at random. By adhering to a strict horizontal flow, Bain and their peers over at McKinsey and BCG help their audiences absorb and quickly grasp the info delivered in a deck.
Typical structure of a Bain presentation slide
While Bain’s decks are crafted using the horizontal flow technique, the individual body slides follow a downward (or “top-down”) vertical flow, an approach based on the Pyramid Principle. Per the Pyramid Principle, the key idea of a slide is presented at the top. Beneath the main idea are the arguments made in support of it. Each argument, in turn, has several pieces of evidence backing it up. This approach makes it easy for the audience to follow the logic Bain uses to support the claims it makes.
Below is an example of a typical Bain body slide from its Procurement Best Practices Through COVID-19 deck. You can see how Bain’s key message occupies the top spot of the slide, and how the elements below reinforce it with several arguments and bits of data.
Learn to build Bain-style consulting decks quicker with the power of AI
Heavy research and analysis, skilful storytelling, and masterful graphic design are all key to building consulting decks that match Bain’s persuasive and informative prowess. It’s taken Bain years to perfect these elements, and you should likewise expect to dedicate a great deal of time and effort to recreating Bain’s slide-making magic in your own presentations.
To accelerate your progress, try building your consulting decks using an AI-powered slide creation program, like Plus AI.
Now, the slide maker won’t replicate a Bain presentation for you. However, it will auto-generate a presentation from scratch. Whether all you have is a single idea, or are armed with all the materials needed to build a deck, tell Plus AI everything you can about the presentation you want, and it will generate one for you. You can then use this slide deck as a starting point and manually infuse it with all the elements that make Bain’s presentations so effective.
Also, Plus AI will take care of themes and formatting, so instead of wasting time tweaking fonts and colors, you can focus on the presentation content.
How to use Plus AI to create a Bain-style consulting deck
Here are the steps for building a presentation using Plus AI, then refining it with Bain’s best practices.
- Start the Plus AI extension in either PowerPoint or Google Slides. Then click on the “New presentation” button.
- Choose how you’d like to prompt Plus AI. There are three prompting methods. The first, “Use a prompt,” is ideal if you haven’t done much research yet, but have a good idea of what the presentation should cover. “Upload a file” is your go-to option if you have documents with materials you’d like Plus AI to use in crafting the deck. Meanwhile, the “Slide by slide” method puts you in the driver’s seat, and you get to prompt each slide in the presentation individually.
- Enter your prompt. Say you’re making a presentation about the United States economic outlook for years 2024-2025, and are relying on a report with relevant data. You can save the report on your desktop, then upload it using Plus AI’s “Choose a File” prompting option.
- Select a template. Before you generate the presentation, select a template with colors and layouts you find appealing. Plus AI has several sleek, professional presentation templates for you to choose from.
- Hit “Generate Presentation” and wait for the slide deck to show up on your screen.
- Edit the presentation. Your new, AI-generated slide deck is an excellent jumping off point for creating a compelling, Bain-style consulting deck. But you still have some work to do — namely, you need to implement the storytelling principles and top-down slide structure that Bain uses to make its presentations so informative and persuasive. Fortunately, you won’t have to worry about the more laborious tasks like formatting and layouts, and the bulk of the content will be there, ready for you to mold.
Find out more about AI-powered slide creation
Ready to learn more about creating powerful slide decks and harnessing the power of AI to build presentations? Head over to Plus AI’s resource catalog, and you’ll find guidance on creating attractive presentations, preparing to present your slide deck, various tips and tricks for using Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint, and more.
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