John was frustrated.

He was reviewing the Marketing plans submitted by his Managers across the different Markets that came under his purview. With margins already under pressure, he wanted to optimize his spend across categories and regional markets.

He was quite sure that there were lessons from the different markets within his purview (and a few outside) that could make his team’s marketing plans more effective.

There was certainly money lying on the table. Problem was – how to go about “cracking it”?

Sounds familiar?

Take comfort in knowing you are not alone. Marketing Heads and Category Managers in CPG firms across the globe are grappling with the same problems. The issues are:

A lot of forward-looking Category Managers and Marketing Leaders are vexed with these questions. Some of them brush this under the carpet, as they don’t have an outlook beyond 3-4 years (which is their average lifetime in their roles). However, the sincere ones are desperately looking for a robust analytical solution to address the above.

Enter Category Maturity Model. This is an analytics framework that helps Marketing Managers understand the development path of each of their global / regional markets on a category evolution curve. This enables them to effectively re-use and adopt effective Marketing strategies from comparable markets that went through a similar evolution.

More details on Category Maturity Model in our next blog…

Authored by Imran Saeed  – CPG Leader, Director at Absolutdata, and Ramakrishnan M  – Analytics Enthusiast, Associate Director at Absolutdata..

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