Category strategy and analytics for consumer packaged goods

A small senior team that does the analysis, then stays until the shelf changes.

Edgewood Consulting Group advises manufacturers and retailers on assortment, pricing, trade promotion and net revenue decisions. Our consultants run the work themselves and remain with your team through the buyer presentation and the reset that follows.

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What we do

Insight, innovation and implementation, handled by the same people.

Most advisory work stops at the deck. Ours is organized so that the research informs the strategy and the strategy is carried into the retailer meeting by the consultants who built it.

  • Insights

    Shopper decision hierarchy research that explains how shoppers choose, substitute or walk away. Trade Probes, our retail buyer interviews, tell you what the category manager actually thinks before you commit spend. Together they give a view of the category a buyer will accept as objective.

  • Innovation

    Category thought-leadership platforms, shopper marketing and category management strategy, and growth plans that start from the research rather than from a recycled playbook. The aim is a position the retailer wants to hear, not a brand pitch dressed as a category story.

  • Implementation

    AssortmentEdge® assortment optimization, pricing and trade promotion analysis, and RevenueEdge™ full-market simulation for net revenue management. Each is delivered as a service: our team runs the models and works alongside your brand and customer teams on the outcome.

How an engagement runs

From the business question to the retailer's decision.

Every engagement is scoped to a specific decision and a specific retailer conversation. The steps below describe how the work usually proceeds.

  1. 1

    Define the decision

    We begin with the question your team has to answer and the meeting in which the answer has to hold up. Scope, data sources and the people involved on both sides are agreed before any analysis starts.

  2. 2

    Do the analysis

    Our consultants run the research, the modelling and the scenarios. You are not handed software and a manual. You receive a recommendation with the reasoning laid out, at the level of detail a category director expects.

  3. 3

    Make it retailer-ready

    The recommendation is built for the buyer's desk: item level, tied to that retailer's planogram, and framed around the category rather than your brand alone, so it reads as objective instead of self-serving.

  4. 4

    Stay through adoption

    We remain with your brand and customer teams through the line review and the reset, and we revise the work when the retailer's strategy shifts. The engagement ends when the recommendation is on the shelf, not when the deck is delivered.

Who we typically work with

The people who own a category decision and have to defend it.

Our clients are senior functional leaders at manufacturers and, on the other side of the desk, the merchandising teams they present to.

  • Directors and vice presidents of category management
  • Sales and customer team leaders responsible for major retail accounts
  • Shopper and consumer insights leaders
  • Net revenue management and revenue growth management teams
  • Brand and innovation leaders weighing a launch or a category entry
  • Retail merchandising and category teams seeking an objective read on the category

We work across the Food, Drug, Mass, Club, Dollar and Online channels, and we take on a limited number of clients per category so that our advice to a retailer remains objective.

Bring us the category you are debating.

Tell us the category, the retailer and the decision in front of you. We will say plainly whether our work applies and what it would involve.

Ask about your category