Three Reasons to Understand the Big Picture Category Management Trends

It doesn’t matter what kind of marketing or cat man you do, you’re expected to be a change agent for your business.

You look at what needs to change in your business to improve performance and do it based on evidence and objective truth, not just gut feel.

You likely have a mass of data to help you. Few of us in CPG are short of data about performance these days, even though it’s expensive. But most of it by its very nature looks backwards and often limited in scope.

This is where other trend sources come in

How do trends help?

1.     A trend is a pointer to the future. If you can show a continuous change over multiple time periods, there is a greater chance it will continue into the next. So, you can base your forward thinking around it.

2.     Trends can be inspirational. If they are driven by underlying consumer/shopper needs (as they should be) they are a window into society and what is happening under the surface. They uncover emerging truths that may impact your business going forward.

3.     Objective data on trends supports other research. Often the most insightful learnings may come from qualitative research so you don’t have a lot of hard evidence. Trend data acts as a triangulation to support your thinking. And in turn persuade others of its veracity.

Where do you get trend data?

Well, you can ask Chat GPT 😊 but, traditionally, big picture market trends are the province of consulting firms who use their immersion in a topic to talk about what they “see” going on.

Most of the big MR companies like Nielsen, Kantar and Circana issue regular high level reports based on their data.

There are also professional “futurists” who glean information from wide networks to sense change. These are fairly subjective of course but aim to push much further into the future.

Richard Watson is one of the best.

Google tells you what people are searching for. That’s a good objective signal.

For CPG, our own Category Trend Analyser uses web scraping tech to see what people are “talking about.”

Feel free to suggest other sources on trends you have found helpful in the past. It makes sense to use more than one source (they will certainly differ), so the more the merrier!