One thing I learned in my 25-year career retail and CPG is that when it comes to data quality at companies, nobody raises their hand and says "No problem...I'll take care of it." Most of the time the problem gets pushed to IT, and they may attempt to throw some technology at the problem, but it rarely helps. The business needs clean data to run their reports, analysis, and AI models, and they complain when they spend a significant amount of time cleaning up data. It's frustr

With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLM) models like ChatGPT into the corporate world, it's not hard to see that any job that requires sitting in front of a computer screen and critically thinking about what to type is bound to be disrupted. Even the mission of this website, and its focus on actionable analytics is at risk. I predict in less than 18 months most companies will be leveraging some form of generative AI in their day-to-day decision making, and n

Wait what? Every day we are constantly being bombarded with predictions that AI will replace almost any job that involves some degree of critical thinking -- now this? Yes, the new AI buzzword is hallucinations, and not the flashback kind in the horror movies, but a digital version of it. Apparently, these AI hallucinations can occur when the generative AI models are trained on faulty data, lack computational power, or are trained too tightly to match the training set,

After working with several small CPG brands over the last few years, one common question is about point of sale (POS) data. Brands usually have some modicum of information about sales to the consumer, otherwise known as sell-thru data. Yet they all admit to feeling somewhat blind. Most of their sell-thru POS data is available through big retailers' data platforms such as 84.51 (Kroger), Retail Link (Walmart), or Vendor Central (Amazon), or Whole Foods (Quicksight). When your

The AI disruption that started with the release of open source ChatGPT in the fall of 2022 continues to disrupt most organizations. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a technology that leverages deep learning (Burke, 2023). In the race to be first in AI, the big software vendors baked in these ChatGPT capabilities into their tools almost overnight, many without any real thought on how it can add value. In addition, Bova et al. (2023) explain that quantum compu

In the CPG world, the terms consumer and customer are commonly conflated. However, the distinction remains important. The consumers of your product are your reason for existence. Consumers find your brand's value proposition appealing, as it fills a need, want, or emotional purpose. Almquist et al. (2016) describe these needs, wants, and emotions as the elements of your brand value. It's the reason that consumers shell out their hard-earned money to purchase your brand. I

Most brands know trade promotion is necessary in the grocery industry, but the real question is how much is enough? Some brands can get away with trade spends of 10-15% of shipped sales, while others need 20-25%. Trade promotion is essential for almost all categories, as Chevalier and Curhan (1976) were one of the first to have shown that product family or class has little influence on the effectiveness of this trade promotion investment. In addition, Haines (2007) explai

Many of our favorite iconic brands all started from someone's intuition about potential needs in a market. This creation process is rarely deductive, where a theory is cooked up in some corporate R&D lab. But many times, genuine innovation happens inductively, where a novel idea just pops into someone's head based on empirical experience and data (Rumelt, 2022). New and innovative brands are the growth engine that disrupts and propels many industries forward. Therefore, as

You may be wondering, OK, where is he going with this post? Bear with me and let me explain. First a quick review of the two constructs. Deductive thinking is when you start with a theory, develop a null hypothesis, gather data through observations, and then disprove your null hypothesis. For example, you could have a theory that cold weather causes ice cream sales to decline. So, you would form a null hypothesis (weather does not affect sales), gather data, and attempt to

The concept of brand value is one of the most debated topics in the marketing literature. While there are many methods of calculating brand value, Goldfarb et al. (2009) provide a pithy definition. The authors define brand value as the extra profit earned by a brand over and above what it would have earned based on its observable attributes. These observable attributes are product utility, size, packaging, and price. Another method is the premium-private calculation, or the d

The ideas that underpin sales and operations planning (S&OP) are simple and intuitive. Getting the sales and manufacturing teams collaborating with one another, and aligning on a sales and production forecast seems so obvious. So obvious in fact that one may ask why companies need a dedicated process. And while it's true that the underlying concepts are common sense, the implementation of S&OP is very difficult, and many companies are frustrated with the maturity of their S

Coming Soon! JimSwallow@AccuDataNow.com References: