CPG Resources

Consumer packaged goods companies don't lose money in any one department. They lose it in the gaps between departments — the places where a brand plan, a sales commitment, and a supply forecast all have to agree with each other and usually don't. Trade spend gets committed before demand planning has locked a forecast. A promotion calendar built in isolation from category management creates volume nobody can fulfill without expediting freight or cutting into next quarter's inventory. Each function is optimizing something real, but nobody owns the seams, and the seams are where yield quietly leaks out.

This is an old problem in CPG, and most of the tooling built to fix it just automates one silo faster rather than closing the gap between silos. Trade promotion management systems get better at tracking spend but still run on assumptions demand planning never validated. Demand planning gets more statistically sophisticated but still reacts to sales commitments after they're made instead of shaping them. Revenue growth management, done well, is really an attempt to force these functions to reconcile in real time instead of at quarter-end, when the money's already gone.

The articles below cover trade promotion effectiveness, demand planning practices, and revenue growth management approaches for CPG organizations trying to close that gap — with a particular eye toward where brand, sales, and supply chain decisions need to inform each other before commitments are locked in, not after.