Mounting challenges

Between inflation, supply chain issues, shareholder interests, and competition from all sides, CPG companies face no shortage of challenges. Trying to get this all under control can be quite the task, but the benefits are substantial.  

Responsive companies have the edge. Given our continually shifting environment, CPG companies need to become more flexible, cooperative, and innovative to grow revenue and defend shares. By building a comprehensive data-driven strategy that employs advanced analytics, your organization can gain the ability to quickly pivot and adapt to rapidly shifting market dynamics.  

Here are three key areas a data-driven strategy can help with.

Pricing and revenue growth management

A data-driven strategy, advanced analytics—these terms can sound jargony or hollow. Your organization likely has access to some data, but is it actionable? Can you count on it to provide the insights you need to compete? Sometimes the impulse can be to obtain more data, when what you really need is better data.   

With the right pricing and revenue growth management analytics, you can maximize profitability, eliminate wasteful trade spend, and ensure you have the right price and promotion strategy in place. By gaining a better understanding of volume drivers, you can strategically identify optimal regular and promotional price points and maximize profits. 

Assortment and merchandising

What is on your shelf? Do you have enough of or the right product to meet your consumers’ demands? A key part of a data-driven strategy is ensuring that your assortment is optimized and properly built for sustainable growth.   

With advanced analytics, you can optimize your assortment, simplify planning, drive better performance, and improve the way you characterize, organize, and visualize your shelf. It all comes down to being able to better understand your shopper’s behavior.  

By having access to valuable consumer insights, you can more easily:

• Identify and implement a product mix that meets the needs of your diverse market  
• Translate shopper and assortment strategy onto the shelf to ensure you maintain optimal share of space and positioning to increase sales
• Drive incremental sales to better meet shopper’s needs with immersive reality tools

Route-to-market

As all CPG companies are aware, one size does not fit all consumers. Needs and consumer preferences change based on region and environment. A proper data-driven strategy allows you to precisely target local markets by evaluating opportunities to increase sales and quantify the impact of potential outputs, media, and in-store actions.  

Precision is the key term here. You can’t afford to lose money on tactics that are too broad, shoehorning in what appear to be similar markets that are anything but. You need a strategy and tool that provides an in-depth understanding of how to prioritize investments and how/where to execute at the local level with greater precision.  

The right advanced analytics should allow you to:

• Evaluate current product distribution, identify the best stores to target, and project the potential impact on sales   
• Prioritize the best placement of your salesforce, including identifying the ideal size and location for the most impact   
• Quantify the impact of media and in-store actions before full roll-out based on simulated test and control groups

Putting data to work

As a CPG company, you’re well aware of the volume of data available to you. However, access to information does not necessarily equal understanding. Finding the truth requires clear and clean data, not a bottomless ocean of numbers  

NielsenIQ can help you build actionable analytics that fuel consistent and accelerating growth.