Using Technology to Drive Growth

Digital transformation, once a necessary journey, is now an urgent priority for consumer products brands. Starting with a deep understanding of your business—and the consumer products industry—we help you find the right use cases for developing the digital capabilities that power consumer-centric innovation.

Mastering digital can mean a big game of catchup that affects your value chain, channel mix, and position in the broader retail ecosystem. We begin our consumer products consulting services by partnering with you to define, test, and prove how advanced data collection and analysis, AI, digital supply chain, and other enhancements will create value—before expanding or embedding these capabilities in your operating model. We automate what’s transactional and create cross-functional teams to harness the ingenuity and innovation you’ll need to meet consumers’ changing demands.

See more of our consumer products consulting team

How BCG Helps Consumer Products Companies Prepare for the Future

Artificial Intelligence

AI applications can drive impressive growth in fast-moving consumer goods and other CPG companies. From demand forecasting to individualized store-level assortment to AI-powered cost-reduction strategies, we help you define your best opportunities and build a robust model that proves AI’s benefit in today’s economic uncertainty.

Consumer Insights

From the food industry to consumer durable goods, managing a portfolio of products requires new methods for acting on consumer insights. To guide brand investment and redraw segmentations, our Demand-Centric Growth Approach maps what is driving consumers’ choices in each category or niche so you can build advantaged positions with strong growth potential.

Digital Marketing

Achieving digital marketing maturity is an organization-wide challenge, and it takes strong cross-functional teams to put personalization data to work. We help CPG companies integrate digital tools, collaborate with agencies and martech providers, and blend new talent with current staff and external creatives to drive results.

Digital Supply Chain

The CPG industry was once dominated by companies that owned their value chain, but now winners are positioned to tap into a broad ecosystem of external partners. To help CPG companies make this fundamental shift to an external orientation, we start with a clean sheet to determine the functions that partners can do as well or better, and which functions are critical to keep in-house.

Digital Transformation

Bridging digital gaps requires the right operating model, effective data governance, and robust digital platforms, run by people who can proactively address growing pains. This is the hallmark of what we call the bionic company, where a blend of human and technological capabilities drives an unprecedented level of innovation.

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)

Are you ready for FMCG’s future? Five seismic shifts, including a radical reshaping of channels and an AI-powered revolution of business models, will define the next era of FMCG competition. Learn more about what these changes mean for your business—and how companies are already responding.

Innovation Strategy

Whether innovating at the product, service, or business-model level, we begin by looking outside your organization to understand trends shaping demand, then turn inside to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current consumer products innovation system. Combining views, we pinpoint the most attractive domains for investment.

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Marketing Personalization

To reach your consumers, you need to know where they’re looking, how they purchase—and even precisely when they’re ready to buy. Using 360˚ consumer profiles, enhanced by AI systems, and retail partnerships, we can help you create “segment of one” targeting, tailored to specific channels and capable of being scaled up to capture massive market share.

Pricing and Net Revenue Management

Pricing optimization and NRM interventions can drive significant short-term impact. Putting our depth of experience and industry experience to work, we help you fund your own EBIT improvement through brand portfolio pricing, trade terms management, and dynamic pricing that answers the demands of shoppers and ecosystem supply chains alike.

Sustainability

There’s a significant opportunity to make sustainability a source of competitive advantage across the value chain. We help you rewire decision making to embed sustainability as a core corporate value, linking it to shareholder return.

Zero-Based Budgeting

More than a one-time cost strategy, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) introduces a new way of working with reinvestment principles. ZBB decreases complexity, increases the transparency essential to clear cost ownership, and establishes a new culture of cost-consciousness that has proven to achieve 12% to 30% savings in SG&A for CPG companies.

Our Client Work with the Consumer Products Industry

A multinational food and beverage retailer, with supply chain organizations across more than 20 markets, engaged BCG and BCG GAMMA to build a machine-learning algorithm to improve its demand forecast. The project increased accuracy by 4 to 18 percentage points, reduced demand planners’ time by 50%, and returned an additional 0.4% to 0.8% points EBIT.
BCG engaged with a global personal care company to establish digital marketing centers of excellence in six countries, with staff capable of integrating 3,000 sites and social pages into personalized customer journeys. The company has become an aggressive digital marketer, with more than 50 global digital campaigns delivering, on average, three times the ROI.
A South American electronics and furniture retailer engaged BCG and BCG GAMMA to create a localized demand forecaster to optimize assortment at more than 1,000 stores. Our machine learning approach leveraged multiple data sets, including geolocational data, to generate demand estimates, creating potential increases of $200 million in sales and $50 million in cash margin.
To embed data-driven marketing at an iconic global brewer, BCG helped develop cross-functional teams across ten countries that produced more than 50 pilot campaigns over two years. The new marketing effort doubled digital media ROI, reduced cost-per-touchpoint by 30%, and increased offline sales by more than 10% in pilot areas.

CPG Industry Client Testimony: Building a New Strategy with New Leadership

Carlsberg’s former CSO discusses the company’s collaboration with BCG to define strategic priorities, unite the organization, and act on future trends.

Explore Our Insights on the Consumer Products Industry

Advantage Beyond the Crisis

In order to emerge stronger, companies must ensure that their response to COVID-19 is not just immediate, but also transformational.

Cracking the AI Code in CPG

CPG companies may be masters at marketing, but when it comes to advanced analytics and AI, there’s room for improvement. To catch up, they need to study lessons from successful early adopters.