Consumer Products Industry Overview

Digital transformation, once a necessary journey, is now an urgent priority for consumer products brands. Starting with a deep understanding of your business, BCG’s consumer products consultants help clients find the right use cases to develop the digital capabilities that power consumer-centric innovation.

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.

Our Services for Consumer Products Companies

Fast-Moving Consumer Goods

Retail Industry

Fashion Industry

Luxury Goods

Alternative Proteins

How We Help CPG Companies Prepare for the Future

Customer Insights

From the food industry to consumer durable goods, managing a portfolio of products requires new methods of acting on customer 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 industry-wide challenge for the consumer products industry. 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.

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 optimizations drive significant impact for CPG companies. 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.

Climate Change and Sustainability

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

Our Client Success with the Consumer Products Industry

Distilling Lessons in Digital Sales and Marketing

Pierre-Yves Calloc’h, chief digital officer at Pernod Ricard, explains how BCG and BCG X helped the wine and spirits company build and deploy digital programs that have improved P&L by optimizing brand investment, promotion calendars, and sales activities.

Revolutionizing the Perfume Industry with AI

Scentmate breaks into new markets for Firmenich by using digital technologies, including AI and machine learning, to meet the fragrance needs of entrepreneurs and independent brands.

A multinational food and beverage retailer, with supply chain organizations across more than 20 markets, engaged us 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.

We 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 worked with us 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, we 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.

Our Solutions for CPG Companies

Growth AI by BCG

This holistic suite of AI offerings is designed to maximize the growth potential of consumer packaged goods companies. It supports data-driven decisions across and within standard commercial functions including pricing and promotion, marketing allocation, product and service innovation, and route-to-consumer sales to improve strategy, planning, and execution.

Smart Allocation by BCG

Turbocharged by BCG X's technology asset Alloc AI, Smart Allocation offers an integrated transformation experience. Leveraging BCG’s deep expertise and transformation capabilities, Smart Allocation optimizes marketing and commercial budget allocation across salesforce and direct-to-consumer touchpoints.

Meet Our Experts in Consumer Products

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SIIA CODiE Award: Best Artificial Intelligence Driven Technology Solution, 2023 - Growth AI By BCG

BCG won the CODiE Award for Best Artificial Intelligence Driven Technology Solution for its tool Growth AI by BCG.

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Explore Our Insights on the Consumer Products Industry

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