Post by The Partnering Group

Thirty years ago, The Partnering Group coined the term Category Management and designed its architecture roots up, and then we rolled it out across the world to help retailers and suppliers grow together. Hence our name: The Partnering Group. Our CEO, Frank Grossi, authored the original 8-step process that became the global standard. He and our team of hands-on industry practitioners (e.g. retail merchants, CPG category leaders) have continued to evolve and expand the best practices of Category Management. Having helped build over 2,000+ category plans across 65+ countries, we've streamlined those original eight steps into a sharper, faster approach. An approach powered by deep shopper data and insights that delivers a true omnichannel growth plan, not just a shelf set. We have also published over 29 Best Practice reports on Category Management that have helped shape the industry’s approach to driving win/win solutions with partners. Now we're changing the process again with our new approach: Category Accelerator.  Category Accelerator is TPG's AI-powered platform that automates the grind work of Category Leadership by ingesting the widest set of retail, shopper, and social digital data to generate deep category diagnostics, prioritized growth drivers, and retailer-tailored tactics. It compresses what used to take weeks of analyst work into hours ( ~75% time saved) while enforcing a consistently high standard across every category and output. Crucially, it doesn't replace human judgment but provides practitioners a draft growth plan to sharpen, sense-check, and bring to retailers. We launched it with one of the largest food suppliers in the world and delivered a breakthrough US category plan in 2 weeks, not the usual 12+. Then a customer-specific version, again in 2 weeks. Everyone is chasing AI to sharpen their business processes. We've just delivered it on one of the most important processes in all of CPG - built by the people who architected Category Management in the first place. Several suppliers are already in pilot conversations with us. If you want to see what's possible, let's talk. Comment below or reach out to Mike Holcomb or Peter Leech.