Hello,

Businesses need strategy that drives and guides your and your team’s decision making, while increasing alignment and efficiencies to be successful.

In a world without strategy, your team is likely creating tactical output – whether it’s 70-page PowerPoint decks, tools with lots of bar and pie charts, or assortment analysis … you get it! 

We talk a lot in today’s category management world about the sexy stuff like shopper insights, big data, and storytelling – but the reality is that a surprising number of individuals lack a basic understanding of the foundations of category management and may also struggle to differentiate between data, fun facts, and true insights.

CMKG’s online Retail & CPG Skills Assessment, gives us evidence of limited category management foundational understanding. For example, in topics like Category Management Overview, Category Roles, and Category Definition and Segmentation, the average scores are much lower than you might expect. Of note, our online assessment test has become a huge motivator for individuals to identify their learning gaps in a non-invasive or scary way — read more about the assessment below.

As a manager, strategy is also most likely a part of your responsibilities, including the development of well-defined category management strategies, processes, and guidelines that create internal alignment and connect what individuals do in their work with your overall strategies. And this ultimately helps you achieve the overall goals and objectives for your team and makes decision-making much easier for everyone.

There are many different components that help to build strategy (some may be controlled by you, others may not), including:

OVERARCHING STRATEGIES

As a manager, there may be an opportunity to refresh and articulate your overall category management strategies and goals to align with overall organizational goals (both short- and long-term). According to Forbes, only 65% of organizations have an agreed-upon strategy, 14% of employees understand the organization’s strategy, and less than 10% of all organizations successfully execute the strategy.

Here are some ways to improve your current strategies:

1. Refresh (or develop) your category management strategies and definitions considering the advancements that have been made in the past 10 years – you could even have some of your team help you work on the updates
   • Check out CMKG’s category management scorecards for both retailers and manufacturers
2. Define your strategic collaborative partnerships (realizing that not all partners are created equal)
3. Identify ways to reduce silos within your organization using category management foundations
4. Articulate overall strategies to your team and other departments within the organization

STRATEGIC THINKING

Strategic thinking is about being able to plan for the future and because our industry is always rapidly changing, it’s critical for you and your team to keep up with all of the changes going on. We recently ran a skill-building webinar on Identifying Trends which focused on the key drivers changing our environment, identifying some megatrends that are having a profound impact on our business and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. 

1. Move from analyzing data to identifying true insights, resulting in better decision-making — this is the biggest requirement for effective decision-making and storytelling
2. Become more proactive and learn how to use critical thinking to make better decisions and recommendations
3. Collaborate both internally and externally for better solutions
4. Have a short- and long-term focus for your business and learn how to identify relevant trends and drivers

This newsletter is dedicated to strategy and I hope I have given you some tools to help you move towards a more strategic place.  

Happy learning!