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

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