Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies operate in a highly dynamic retail landscape, requiring innovative approaches to maintain competitiveness.
Unsurprisingly, these innovations revolve in no small part around data and its strategic usage across supply chains and customer ecosystems. The right analytics strategy, in turn, becomes the secret sauce of the entire operational model.
CPG analytics transforms raw sales numbers, shopper behaviors, and operational insights into decisions that grow market share, boost margins, and power innovation while enabling businesses to better cater to evolving consumer demands.
As the volume and variety of data grow (as they are pretty much guaranteed to do), analytics provides the foundation for scaling the insights retail and CPG organizations use to outpace and outperform their competitors.
Key Challenges in CPG Analytics
Like many industries, the number one challenge in CPG analytics consists of managing large data estates built up of countless data sources. These sources, more often than not, operate in isolation from one another, resulting in a lack of consistency or completeness.
These data estates become especially hard to manage when they lean on outdated technologies that can’t keep pace with the cloud-driven, near-real-time demands of modern consumers.
Taken together, silos and misalignments within an enterprise’s data stack can snowball to impede the ways data is collected and used.
Three Analytics Superpowers Every CPG Brand Needs
- Demand Sensing & Forecasting: Moving beyond guesswork, brands can align inventory with demand signals like point-of-sale systems and weather trends to minimize stockouts and overstock risks. Prescription: layer predictive models into your planning cycle to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive agility.
- Promotion & Pricing Optimization: Analytics uncovers which trade promotions yield true incremental lift and which are just noise. Models such as marketing mix modeling let you simulate promo scenarios and fine-tune pricing for maximum ROI.
- Omni-Channel & Customer 360 View: With a growing number of households shopping both online and in-store, unified analytics across channels is critical. Clean, organized data across channels can power personalization, targeted assortment, and sharper segmentation.
Shifting Tech Stacks, Shifting CPG Analytics Strategies
Certain truths hold true: brands that lean into analytics gain an innovation edge when it comes to smarter pitching, deeper consumer engagement, and optimized supply chains.
The most forward-looking CPG firms, however, aren’t just interpreting data. They’re harmonizing it across channels, suppliers, and touch points for continuous improvement.
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, meanwhile, are transforming CPG analytics by enabling faster, more precise processing of these large datasets—even those built up of unstructured data.
These tools reveal patterns and trends that may once have escaped detection, allowing enterprises to be more turnkey than ever before while refining their operating models to keep up with changing markets.
Hakkōda’s Approach to CPG Analytics
When it comes to scaling analytics capabilities for the modern era, the right blend of business and technical expertise is paramount.
Hakkoda’s retail and CPG practice was built to bridge those two domains, bringing together advanced analytical technologies and AI implementation roadmaps with an eye for industry-sensitive obstacles and opportunities.
Our modern data stack solutions, built with the flexible power of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, allow businesses to unify diverse data sources into a single source of truth.
Leading the Future of Retail & CPG
As retail and CPG companies continue to face shifting consumer behaviors, volatile supply chains, and mounting competitive pressures, modernizing their underlying data analytics becomes a sink or swim proposition.
The brands that win will be those that not only collect data, but also connect it, harmonize it, and activate it faster than their peers. Leaders at the forefront of the industry are already doing exactly that.
Fortunately for those still building their analytics strategy, they don’t have to do it alone. By combining deep retail expertise with modern data platforms like Snowflake, Hakkoda, an IBM Company, enables organizations to transform fragmented data into actionable insights—fueling everything from accurate demand forecasts to optimized promotions and personalized customer experiences.
Whether you’re planning your first analytics playbook or scaling to enterprise-ready AI, a modern approach to CPG analytics unlocks smarter marketing, sharper execution, and sustained growth.
Connect with Hakkoda today to build an analytics strategy that transforms data into your greatest strategic asset.
