Category: brand commitment

Category Management: A Key Guide for CPG Companies

by Krina Rathodin brand, brand advocacy, brand commitment, Brand Managers, brand preference, Brand Trust, Branding, CPG, CPG, Explorazor

As a decision maker in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, you’re no doubt aware of the importance of staying ahead of the curve. 

With consumers increasingly demanding more personalized and convenient products, and competition from both established brands and up-and-coming disruptors, it can be challenging to keep up. This is where Category Management comes in.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what Category Management is, its benefits, key elements, steps to implementing a successful strategy, and challenges CPG companies may face in doing so.

What is Category Management?

At its core, Category Management is a strategic approach to managing product categories. It involves analyzing and understanding customer needs, assessing the competition and market trends, and developing and executing a plan that maximizes the value of a particular category to the business.

The goal is to increase sales, profit margins, and market share by offering the right products to the right customers at the right time, all while minimizing costs and improving operational efficiency.

Why is Category Management Important in the CPG Industry?

Category Management is particularly important, where margins can be tight and competition is fierce. By adopting a Category Management approach, CPG companies can:

Gain a better understanding of their customers and what they want, which allows them to tailor their product offerings and marketing strategies accordingly.

Increase the effectiveness of their promotions and pricing strategies, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Optimize their product mix and inventory levels, reducing waste and lowering costs.

Identify new growth opportunities by analyzing market trends and identifying unmet customer needs.

Benefits of Category Management

Some of the key benefits of Category Management include:

Increased Sales and Profitability

By analyzing consumer needs and buying behavior, Category Management can help CPG companies create more effective product assortments, promotions, and pricing strategies. This, in turn, can lead to increased sales and profitability.

For example, consider a CPG company that sells laundry detergent.

By using Category Management techniques to analyze customer needs, the company may discover that customers in certain regions prefer products with natural ingredients. By offering a natural detergent option in those regions, the company can increase sales to that particular customer segment.

Improved Operational Efficiency

Category Management can help CPG companies optimize their product mix and inventory levels, reducing waste and improving operational efficiency.

By focusing on the most profitable products and minimizing slow-moving or unprofitable items, companies can reduce costs and improve their bottom line.

Better Understanding of Market Trends and Competition

By analyzing market trends and assessing the competition, Category Management can help CPG companies identify new growth opportunities and stay ahead of the curve. This can include identifying emerging product categories or analyzing consumer behavior to identify new target markets.


In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at the key elements of a successful Category Management strategy.

Understanding the customer and their needs

One of the key elements of Category Management is understanding the needs and preferences of your target customers. This includes identifying the products and services that your customers are looking for, as well as the features and benefits that they value most. 

By understanding your customers’ needs, you can create more targeted and effective Category Management strategies that address those needs and differentiate your products from your competitors’.

Assessing the competition and market trends 

Another important element of Category Management is assessing the competitive landscape and market trends.

This involves monitoring the performance of your competitors, understanding their strategies, and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their products and services. You should also stay up-to-date on the latest market trends and changes in consumer behavior that could impact your Category Management strategies.

Developing and executing a Category Management plan

Once you have a solid understanding of your customers and competition, you can develop and execute a Category Management plan. 

This plan should outline your Category Management goals and objectives, the strategies you will use to achieve those goals, and the tactics you will use to implement those strategies. 

It should also include a detailed timeline and budget, as well as metrics for measuring the success of your Category Management efforts.

Steps/Guide to Implement a Category Management Strategy

Conducting a Category Assessment: 

Before you can develop a Category Management strategy, you need to conduct a thorough Category Assessment. This involves analyzing the performance of your products and services, identifying any gaps in your product portfolio, and determining the key drivers of customer behavior in your category.

Defining Category Roles and Strategies: 

Based on your Category Assessment, you can define the roles and strategies for each of your product categories.

This involves determining which products should be prioritized, how to position those products to maximize sales, and which promotional tactics to use to drive customer engagement.

Implementing Category Tactics: 

Once you have defined your Category Roles and Strategies, you can implement specific tactics to achieve your goals.

This may include launching new products, optimizing pricing and promotions, and investing in marketing and advertising campaigns.

Evaluating and Adjusting Category Performance: 

Finally, it is important to regularly evaluate the performance of your Category Management strategy and make adjustments as needed.

This may involve analyzing sales data, conducting customer surveys, and monitoring market trends to ensure that your strategy remains relevant and effective.

Challenges of Category Management

While Category Management can offer significant benefits to CPG companies, there are also a number of challenges that must be addressed. Some common obstacles that companies face when implementing Category Management strategies include:

Data management challenges: With the increasing volume and complexity of data available to CPG companies, it can be difficult to effectively manage and analyze that data to inform Category Management strategies.

Siloed organizational structures:

Category Management requires collaboration and coordination across multiple departments and functions within a company. However, siloed organizational structures can make it difficult to achieve that collaboration and coordination.

Lack of resources: 

Implementing effective Category Management strategies requires significant resources, including time, money, and personnel. Smaller CPG companies may struggle to allocate those resources effectively.

Resistance to change: 

Finally, some employees may be resistant to changes in Category Management strategies, particularly if they have been successful with existing strategies in the past.

To overcome these challenges, CPG companies should focus on building a strong data management infrastructure, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation, and investing in the resources and training needed to implement effective Category Management strategies.

How Explorazor helps Fortune 500 Companies with Category Management.

Explorazor is a data exploration tool that helps CPG companies optimize their categories by providing real-time data-driven insights. Here’s how:

Combining all datasets: We combine all datasets, including Nielsen, Kantar, Primary Sales, Secondary Sales, Media, and more, into one harmonized dataset into a single source of truth, eliminating the need to run around data custodians or extract pivots from multiple excel files.

AI engine: An AI engine, trained on data of Fortune 500 CPG companies, sends alerts and suggests action items. This helps brand managers make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Natural language processing: Once brand managers look at the performance, they can ask Explorazor questions in simple language, without troubling the insights team. This makes data-driven insights accessible to everyone in the organization.

Drill down: Losing market share? Brand managers can drill down across dimensions to figure out if the problem is in distribution or trade promotion and what exactly is the problem. This helps them identify the root cause of issues and take corrective action.

In conclusion, Category Management is a data-driven process that involves managing product categories to increase sales and profits. 

By using data-driven insights, CPG companies can optimize their categories and gain a competitive advantage. 

Explorazor’s data exploration tool is designed to help brand managers achieve this goal by providing real-time data-driven insights. With Explorazor, CPG companies can optimize their categories, improve customer satisfaction, and increase sales and profits.

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The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for CPG Companies

by Krina Rathodin brand, brand advocacy, brand commitment, Brand Manager, Brand Managers, brand preference, Branding

As the world becomes increasingly digital, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry is faced with a critical question: how can companies adapt to the changing e-commerce landscape?

In the fiercely competitive world of consumer packaged goods (CPG), companies are constantly seeking new ways to boost sales and drive growth. With the advent of digital marketing, email marketing has emerged as a powerful tool for CPG companies to connect with their customers and drive sales.

We all know how important it is for businesses to stay ahead of the curve in marketing while remaining competitive.

In this blog post, we will explore the power of email marketing in the CPG industry, its benefits, and how it can help you increase your sales.

By the end of this post, you will have a clear understanding of why email marketing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, and how you can use it effectively to connect with your target audience, drive sales, and achieve your business goals.

So, let’s dive in and discover the world of email marketing for CPG companies.

Understanding Your Audience

Email marketing has become an integral part of any successful marketing campaign. With an estimated 4.03 billion email users worldwide, email marketing has the potential to reach a vast audience.

Identifying the target audience for your email campaigns

However, to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns, it is important to understand your target audience. By creating buyer personas, you can gain insights into your audience’s pain points, interests, and preferences, allowing you to tailor your emails to their specific needs.

As a corporate employee of a CPG company, you understand the importance of identifying and understanding your target audience.

After all, your products are created with your customers in mind. It is essential to know who your target audience is and what they want. Creating buyer personas is a powerful way to achieve this.

Creating buyer personas to understand your audience’s pain points, interests, and preferences

Buyer personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customers. They are based on market research, customer data, and insights from your sales and customer service teams. Buyer personas include information such as demographic data, job titles, goals, challenges, pain points, preferred communication channels, and more.

By creating buyer personas, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and motivations, allowing you to create targeted and relevant email campaigns that resonate with your audience.

To create a buyer persona, start by gathering data from various sources, including market research, customer feedback, and your internal teams.

Look for patterns and commonalities in the data to identify key insights about your audience.

For example, you may find that your target audience is primarily made up of millennials who value sustainability and eco-friendliness.

Once you have gathered your data, it’s time to start building your buyer persona. Start by giving your persona a name and a job title.

This will help you to personalize your persona and make it more relatable. Next, include demographic information such as age, gender, income, and education level.

Then, delve deeper into your persona’s goals, challenges, and pain points. What are they trying to achieve? What obstacles are they facing? What are their biggest frustrations? This information will help you to understand what motivates your audience and how you can help them overcome their challenges.

Finally, consider your persona’s preferred communication channels and content preferences. Do they prefer email, social media, or direct mail? What types of content do they find most valuable?

This information will help you to create email campaigns that your audience will actually want to receive and engage with.

How to Build an effective Email List

In today’s digital age, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways for CPG companies to reach and engage with their target audience. Not only is it cost-effective, but it also provides a direct line of communication between your brand and your customers.

Importance of building an email list

However, to reap the benefits of email marketing, you need to have a quality email list. We will now discuss the importance of building an email list, best practices for building a quality email list, and ways to encourage sign-ups.

You understand that building an email list is essential to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Your email list is a valuable asset that allows you to communicate with your customers, build relationships, and drive sales.

A high-quality email list is made up of subscribers who have opted-in to receive your emails, are interested in your products or services, and are engaged with your brand.

But how do you build a quality email list? It’s not just about collecting as many email addresses as possible.

Instead, it’s about building a list of subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand and are likely to engage with your emails. To achieve this, you need to follow best practices for building a quality email list.

Best ways to build a quality email list

First and foremost, you should always obtain permission from your subscribers before adding them to your email list. This means using opt-in forms and clearly communicating what they will be receiving from you.

Additionally, you should never purchase email lists or add email addresses without explicit consent. This not only violates anti-spam laws but also leads to low engagement rates and high unsubscribe rates.

Another best practice for building a quality email list is to segment your list based on your subscribers’ interests and behavior.

By doing so, you can create targeted email campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your audience. For example, you may want to segment your list based on purchase history, location, or engagement level.

Ways to encourage sign-ups

Encouraging sign-ups is also an essential part of building a quality email list. One way to do this is to offer something of value in exchange for their email address.

This could be a discount code, a free e-book, or access to exclusive content. You can also include opt-in forms on your website, social media profiles, and in-store signage.

Social media is another effective way to encourage sign-ups. By promoting your email list on your social media profiles, you can reach a wider audience and drive sign-ups. You can also use paid social media advertising to reach even more people.

By following best practices for building a quality email list, such as obtaining permission, segmenting your list, and encouraging sign-ups, you can create targeted and relevant email campaigns that resonate with your audience.

So, take the time to build a high-quality email list for your CPG company. It’s an investment that will pay off in the long run.

How to Craft an Effective Email

Now that you have built a quality email list, it’s time to craft effective emails that will engage your subscribers and drive results for your CPG company. The components of an effective email include a strong subject line, engaging and relevant content, a clear call-to-action, and personalization.

In this section, we will discuss tips for creating attention-grabbing subject lines, writing engaging and relevant content, and personalization techniques to make your emails more appealing to your audience.

As a brand manager, director, CXO, or VP of a CPG company, you know that your subscribers’ inboxes are inundated with countless emails every day.

So, how to make your email stand out and get opened?

The first step is to craft an attention-grabbing subject line. A strong subject line should be concise, descriptive, and compelling. It should entice your subscribers to open your email and find out more.

One way to create attention-grabbing subject lines is to use personalization.

Tips for creating attention-grabbing subject lines

This involves incorporating your subscriber’s name, location, or previous purchases into the subject line. Personalization can also extend to the content of your email, making it more relevant to your subscriber’s interests and behavior.

Once you have captured your subscribers’ attention with an attention-grabbing subject line, it’s time to focus on the content of your email. Your email content should be engaging, informative, and relevant to your subscribers. It should provide value to your subscribers and inspire them to take action, whether it’s making a purchase or visiting your website.

Writing engaging and relevant content

One way to create engaging and relevant content is to segment your email list based on your subscribers’ interests and behavior. By doing so, you can create targeted email campaigns that speak directly to your audience’s needs and preferences. For example, if you have subscribers who have purchased your products in the past, you can send them emails about new products or special promotions.

Another way to create engaging content is to use visual elements such as images or videos.

Visual content can help break up long blocks of text and make your email more visually appealing. It can also help convey your message more effectively

How personalization plays an important role in content creation for email marketing

Finally, personalization is key to making your emails more appealing to your audience. Personalization can take many forms, from using your subscriber’s name in the subject line to providing personalized product recommendations based on their previous purchases.

Personalization can help your subscribers feel valued and connected to your brand, which can lead to increased engagement and loyalty.

By understanding the components of an effective email, such as attention-grabbing subject lines, engaging and relevant content, clear call-to-actions, and personalization, you can create email campaigns that resonate with your audience and drive results for your CPG company.

So, take the time to craft effective emails that provide value to your subscribers and inspire them to take action. It’s an investment that will pay off in the long run.

Steps to Measure your Email Campaign Performance

We have now understood how the usage of both captivating subject lines and pers email marketing can be a powerful tool for reaching your audience and driving results.

However, to get the most out of your email campaigns, it’s important to track their performance and make data-driven decisions.

Key metrics to track in email marketing

We will now discuss key metrics to track in email marketing, tools for tracking email campaign performance, and strategies for improving email campaign performance.

One of the most important aspects of email marketing is tracking key metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

These metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates.

Open rates measure the percentage of subscribers who opened your email, while click-through rates measure the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link in your email.

Conversion rates measure the percentage of subscribers who completed a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

Unsubscribe rates measure the percentage of subscribers who opted out of receiving future emails, while bounce rates measure the percentage of emails that were undeliverable.

Best Tools for tracking email marketing campaign performance

To track these metrics, you can use email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Campaign Monitor.

These tools provide analytics dashboards that allow you to track your email campaign performance in real-time.

They also allow you to segment your email list, A/B test your campaigns, and automate your email marketing efforts.

Different ways through which we can improve the email campaign performance

To improve your email campaign performance, there are several strategies you can implement. 

One strategy is to optimize your email content for mobile devices. With more and more people accessing their emails on their mobile devices, it’s essential to ensure that your email content is easy to read and navigate on small screens.

Another strategy is to use A/B testing to test different variations of your email campaigns. A/B testing involves creating two versions of your email campaign and sending them to different segments of your email list. 

By comparing the performance of the two versions, you can determine which one is more effective and optimize your future campaigns accordingly.

As discussed above, Personalization is also key to improving email campaign performance.

By using your subscriber’s name, location, or previous purchases in your email campaigns, you can make them more relevant and engaging to your audience.

Personalization can also extend to the timing and frequency of your email campaigns, ensuring that your subscribers receive your messages at the right time and at the right frequency.

By tracking key metrics, using email marketing tools, and implementing strategies such as optimizing for mobile devices, A/B testing, and personalization, you can create email campaigns that resonate with your audience and drive results for your CPG company. 

So, take the time to track your email campaign performance and make data-driven decisions that will help you achieve your marketing goals.

Email Marketing Examples:

Email marketing has proven to be an effective tool for increasing sales and building brand loyalty. Many CPG companies have embraced email marketing as a key component of their overall marketing strategy, with impressive results

Examples of CPG companies that have successfully used email marketing to increase sales

For instance, Starbucks – In celebration of their 40th anniversary launched a personalized email campaign that used customer data to generate unique and personalized messages for each recipient.

The campaign resulted in a 10% increase in sales as per a report by Campaign Monitor.

Another example is Coca-Cola. They launched a holiday-themed email campaign that featured a virtual Santa Claus who delivered personalized messages to customers.

The campaign generated a 20% increase in open rates and a 73% increase in click-through rates.

Nestle launched an email campaign that featured personalized recipe suggestions based on customers’ dietary preferences and product purchases.

The campaign resulted in a 15% increase in sales.

Procter & Gamble launched an email campaign to promote their Tide PODS product line. The campaign used bold, eye-catching visuals and a simple, clear message to generate a 40% increase in click-through rates.

One of the key strategies that CPG companies use to maximize the effectiveness of their email campaigns is to create compelling content that resonates with their target audience.

For example, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter creates email campaigns that provide valuable information to expectant and new parents.

Their emails contain tips on child-rearing, product recommendations, and other useful content that helps build trust and loyalty among their subscribers.

Similarly, Nestlé Purina’s email campaigns focus on pet care and provide valuable content that pet owners can use to improve the health and wellbeing of their pets. By providing valuable content that their subscribers find useful, these CPG companies are able to build strong relationships with their customers and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

How does Explorazor a Data Exploration Tool help Marketing Teams to get the Required insights?

In addition to compelling content and personalization, CPG companies also use data analytics to measure the effectiveness of their email campaigns and optimize their strategies accordingly.

For instance, PepsiCo uses A/B testing to determine which subject lines, images, and content are most effective in driving engagement and sales.

They also use analytics to track customer behavior and preferences, and then use this information to create more targeted and effective email campaigns.

Trusted by leading CPG & Pharma companies such as GSK, DANONE, Sanofi, Abbot, ALKEM and Olem, Explorazor helps combine all the datasets (Nielsen, Kantar, Primary Sales, Secondary Sales, Media, and more) into one harmonized dataset making it the single source of truth.

Once all the Datasets are added to Explorazor, rather than troubling the insights team, ask those questions to Explorazor in simple language and get the desired insights to your queries.

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Positioning Your Brand to Drive Preference ft. Gartner

by adminin brand, brand advocacy, brand commitment, brand preference, Explorazor, functional benefits, Gartner, personal benefits, Positioning, societal benefits

Driving brand commitment is a major goal for organizations. Gartner defines brand commitment as ‘the degree to which audiences prefer the brand to alternatives (brand preference), feel a personal connection to it (brand connection) and advocate on its behalf (brand advocacy)’. Thus brand preference, brand connection, and brand advocacy are all subsets of brand commitment. 

Now, once solidified, brand commitment is more than just a regular revenue growth strategy. Brand commitment can drive customers to purchase your products at a premium. It drives customer loyalty and advocacy, where the customer promotes your brand on your behalf. Internally, employees already working with the brand seek to be retained, while human talent scouring for opportunities are attracted to your brand. Thus the need for creating brand preference and commitment is clear. 

Creating A Strong Positioning 

Now, there are 3 kinds of benefits that a brand can provide: functional, societal, and personal. An organization can choose to position itself using any one or more than one type of the 3 benefits, to initiate brand commitment. To drive preference, brands need to create strong positioning, which can be done by

  • Avoiding negative advocacy – this is done by branding through functional benefits
  • Communicating a personal benefit that a consumer can derive by being associated with your brand, and demonstrating simultaneously, how the fulfillment of that personal benefit leads to a ‘greater good’, i.e. societal benefit

Personal benefit is understood as a psychological need that a customer fulfills via brand association, while societal benefits range from ethical production, like zero or negative carbon emission, to any other sustainability initiative.

Positioning Through Personal Benefits, Or Using a Combination of Benefits?

Gartner estimates, from a 2022 research conducted among 1,999 consumers, employees, and B2B buyers, that while providing a personal benefit, like a sense of belonging or a sense of growth, is almost thrice as impactful as the other 2 types of benefits, the type of industry matters too. Positioning through personal benefits yielded the best rewards in the manufacturing, healthcare, and natural resources industries. Brand commitment in the technology industry is boosted through functional benefits, while the same connection works between retail and societal benefits.

Brands can use all the 3 benefits at once or combine personal and functional benefits for best results. The latter is because lack of functional benefits drives negative advocacy, so avoiding that, and inserting the impact of personal benefits for positive outcomes, is the best recipe. 

Societal benefits combined with personal benefits as your brand positioning to drive brand commitment is also good, but excluding personal benefits to combine functional and societal benefits yields the least favorable results, comparatively speaking. 

How Will You Position Your Brand?

Even if you miss out on customers actively advocating for your brand, or feeling a core connection with it, you can still focus on making your brand preferable over the others by choosing the right set of benefits as per your industry and other relevant factors. Just make sure that you include personal benefits in your brand messaging. 

Organizations can use these 9 categories as frameworks to develop their own positioning through personal benefits:

  1. A sense of belonging – Making customers feel like they are a part of a certain community
  2. Life purpose – Making customers feel like they can achieve their ambitions through your brand
  3. Growth – Self-explanatory; making customers feel like they can achieve personal development through your product/service
  4. Self-consistency – Basically telling the customer ‘You live a certain life; adopt our product/service to be consistent with the way you live your life’
  5. Autonomy – Helping the customer take charge of their life, or be independent
  6. Competence – Related to autonomy; helping people feel competent, or experts, in something
  7. Security – In other words, offering peace of mind
  8. Esteem – Telling the customer ‘Associate with our product/service and feel confident’
  9. Energy – Providing adventure, or entertainment, or the strength needed to go through life, as an offering

Regardless of How You Position It..

You will need all the intel on market, competition, forecasts, opportunities, threats, and a clear understanding of your own internal budgets, allocations, performance, etc. Right now, if you are doing it in Excel, we have a better proposal for you. Explorazor is refreshing the way users explore data by consolidating all datasets that an organization possesses and bringing it under a common Explorazor roof. There, they can extract data pivots instantly and conduct actual root-cause analysis on the consolidated data. 

Users work faster on Explorazor, because they have ready access to all the data they need, pivot extraction is instant, and their laptops operate faster than before due to data being held in server as against the browser.

Explorazor users, typically Brand or Sales Managers, depend less on the Insights Team for their analysis and test out far more hypotheses than before. 

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We credit Gartner with all observations taken from their survey report