Last week, a client mentioned the comments made in the State of the Union. The President of The United States had remarked that "snack companies think you won't notice when they charge you just as much for the same size bag but with fewer...

Over the years, we have found that many of our hard-working clients have a SKU assortment that is unfortunately not aligned with optimizing portfolio profitability. In fact, it is rare to encounter clients that have an intentional,...

Symphony Retail has offered an on-demand webinar for a few months that provides their point of view on why better assortment planning is more important in 2021 and beyond.  Like many current thought-starters in the industry, this was...

All the best for 2021 everyone! Before the holidays, we outlined the importance of How Brands Grow, What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp as an evidence-based user manual for marketers with a very key central theme. To achieve sustainable...

The first part of How Brands Grow, What Marketers Don’t Know was a business bestseller by Byron Sharp that took the marketing world by storm a decade ago. Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute used evidence-based research...

As "new blood" enters the workforce, I am pleased to see the technical skills at the client growing again as well as the desire to understand the more technical concepts behind our approach to shopper response analytics. In the last couple of...

Incrementality is easily overlooked during a period of economic expansion. We would argue that doing so is bad business when environmental conditions are good. Further, failing to understand the contribution of incrementality versus...

I try not to let the blog turn into a sales pitch. But during a recent discussion on how to encourage clients to invest in Middlegame  services during COVID-19—or once we finally emerge from the pandemic—my business partner...

We like a lot of the things that they do at the fellow analytics firm, SKIM. We take a slightly different approach to understanding shopper response: we explore the historical context of the "wide-angle view" with all the...

All of us have been through a series of rough months so restarting the blog little less serious than usual has been on my mind.  We haven’t been asked about the name of the brand for years, but it came up twice in recent client...

We often refer the book Marketing Metrics: The Manager's Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance. I sent a used copy to a client after highlighting several of the Chapter Seven elements on pricing. The book is easily the best source for...

Numerous analysts and pundits have documented the recent significance of new entrants across categories. They have also noted the challenges these are putting on the large multinational FMCG firms. The dominance of their big brands is rapidly...

We built the Competitive Interaction Analysis (CIA)® platform to work with any combination of geographies, time periods, and products. However, this flexibility has often haunted us when we freely offer to utilize any combination of...

Sam Savage coined the phrase "the flaw of averages.”  I date myself too often in this blog, but I was lucky to discover Sam in 1992 when I was fortunate to attend one of his "Quantitative Management Tools for...

We recently found another wonderful article that the McKinsey team, specializing in FMCG, put together. "Agility@Scale: Solving the growth challenge in consumer packaged goods" defines how to overcome the uphill battle many FMCG categories...

During the last decade, a significant amount of attention has been paid to "Attribute-Based Forecasting" in the demand planning community. The idea originated because new product launches with limited history still require forecasts in...

In 1990, Robert Blattberg published Sales Promotion Concepts, Methods, and Strategies with Scott Neslin. A couple years later, I was eager to get a copy. The book is still on my shelf. The imprint on the first page says: "NU BOOK STORE AUG92...

Some colleagues have called the Market-Share Analysis: Evaluating Competitive Marketing Effectivenessthe "Bible of Middlegame.” I haven’t really tried to dispute the claim. The text by Lee Cooper and Masao Nakanishi is truly a...

We’ve recently connected with Sandy Jap, a Sarah Beth Brown Endowed Professor in Marketing at Emory University, to expand our thinking about transferred demand. I don’t need to ramble any further about the importance of focusing on the...

Recently, a client pointed us to a Forbes article that has a lot of merit: "Overcoming the Pitfalls That Keep Brands from Growing in Developing Asia."    Published in early 2017 by Bain Insights, this article focuses on why...

In late 2017, Nielsen explained that online FMCG channels were less than ten percent of the total global retail market. However, as explained in “A Look at the Evolving Ecommerce Landscape,” the ecommerce sector grew so fast that it...

We have referred to the audit parallelogram a few times in this blog as Middlegame has devoted a lot of focus on assortment, pricing and merchandising for emerging markets. I thought it would eventually be a good idea to explain the audit...

Coverage means different things to different people. Generally, clients refer to it as the comparison between shipments volume from internal auditing systems and the volume reported by a retail tracking service like Nielsen provides....

While developing several hypotheses for a series of scenario-planning exercises, I noted that the Middlegame "wide-angle view"across the entire category offers an enormous opportunity to expand beyond the simulation capability of traditional...

Over 20 years ago, I led a minor revolt at IRI that eventually had CEO Gian Fulgoni make an executive decision. John LaRocca and Jim Sullivan had given me permission to write a position paper on why IRI should forego providing weekly data and...

A recent Wall Street Journal article put one of the most repeated Middlegame findings front and center. Most portfolios are too big and managing all these SKUs is draining clients of resources to effectively compete and win through pricing...

In late September 2017, I participated on a panel at the Marketing Metrics & Analytics Summit in Chicago. A few weeks ago, I realized that the team at Insights Exchange Network had sent me a transcript of the session shortly after the...

  Last year, I reacted to a Retail Wire discussion on category management by going into three ways to increase sales. Recently, my colleague Anne mentioned that I kind of left the conversation hanging and that further discussion about...

For quite some time, Middlegame has argued that promotional price cuts are only an additional attribute for the product during those six or seven seconds that the average shopper surveys the category and makes a choice. It was probably far...

Sometimes we use the blog for shameless promotion, but often I like to talk about people who have been important to Middlegame. We call these our "heroes" entries. Earlier this year, we had a soft launch of our cloud-based simulator studio...

A great discussion was started on Retail Wire in early August about "reinventing" category management. Graeme McVie offers an excellent and very Middlegame-oriented introduction of how category management should be used: An example of how...

Market Structure has always been one of the three key elements of the CIA® platform for the assessment of assortment, pricing, merchandising, and sometimes media. Basically, our Market Structure is the first step in the modeling architecture...

One of our larger FMCG clients recently asked Middlegame if we could help them understand how to better develop and leverage Omni-Channel. Omni-channel management is a multichannel approach to sales designed to provide a seamless shopping...

The overwhelming majority of our work at Middlegame focuses on Assortment, Pricing, and Merchandising to provide what we call Shopper Response Analytics. The significance of these three to overall brand performance is enough to keep us busy...

In the blog “Evaluating Price Response as Opposed to Price Elasticity”, I reinforced the powerful impact of transforming the marketing mindset from the “brand management” approach (which has dominated the FMCG market) to a “portfolio...

Over the summer, a guest viewpoint in Progressive Grocer proclaimed that shopper marketing was dead. Basically, the argument was that retailers must embrace the success in strategic targeting of promotions by Kroger and those facilitated by...

Last year Forbes reported on a survey of more than 200 global FMCG C-suite executives from both the retailer and manufacturer sides of the business. The article summarized the findings with a fairly dire outlook: stating that, "antiquated...

In a recent client meeting, a description of the CIA® methodology led to an in-depth conversation about the use of retail tracking data acquired via scanners in developed markets or audits in emerging markets. It was a great discussion and...

A recent report by McKinsey and Nielsen highlights how FMCG companies could drive winning performances. It is an excellent analysis of top management practices within North American companies and is worth at least skimming through. Overall,...

Last year, Amy Gallo published "A Refresher on Price Elasticity" in the Harvard Business Review). It was a great primer for how most analytics firms address price questions from marketers, and I am a little frustrated with myself for taking...

All of the key principle here at Middlegame got our start in sales and marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, aka what insiders simply call “The Company.” We preach many of the do’s and don’ts we’ve learned over the years with The Company to...

Recently, Middlegame leveraged our novel tool, the Competitive Interaction Analysis (CIA)®, for a very unique purpose. A Middlegame client wanted to a more customer-based evaluation of brand equity. She had worked with other researchers...

At Middlegame, we usually work with direct shopper response levers like assortment, pricing, and merchandising. It is probably at our insistence that buyers shop by SKU which makes it our go-to level of analysis. However, we sometimes get...

In the last blog, I described the PITA Model that we were introduced to while at The Coca-Cola Company. A quick review of that blog will familiarize you with the PITA Model if it is new to you. PITA presents a strategic understanding of the...

While at The Coca-Cola Company, I was introduced to a fairly straightforward approach to comparing markets and their potential. It was called the PITA Model. PITA is a method for breaking down sales into the components that are the real...

In a recent project, we were fairly overwhelmed by the complexity of a client’s trade promotions calendar. It contained numerous and varying discount rates that depended on a complex series of requirements, e.g. 2 for £4, 3 for £5, etc., at...

      It is really amazing that almost 20 years have passed since the landmark article "Modeling Consumer Choice Among SKUs" by Peter S. Fader and Bruce G.S. Hardie in the Journal of Marketing Research (November, 1996). The...

The Canadean Soft Drink Strategy Congress was recently held in Madrid. Pedro Antonio Garcia Lopez, our friend and partner at Itaca Alternative Consulting, was the chair of the event. Middlegame was eager to hear about the conference and Pedro...

During a recent presentation, I had to pause when I was asked what I meant by FMOT. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it had been more than a decade since Procter & Gamble first explained in 2005 how their strategies were targeted at...

For those of us with a formal marketing education in the last century, the idea of the 4Ps was the first thing drilled into our lexicon. Thanks to E. Jerome McCarthy, whose textbook many of us had for Introduction to Marketing, we all can...

While catching up with an old colleague last month, we each shared what we had been working on and swapped opinions on a number of business activities. As the conversation progressed, he suggested that what I was describing at Middlegame was...

      In our last blog, we explained the core technology that drives the foresights that Middlegame provides: Competitive Interaction Analysis (CIA)®. During a recent conversation, one of our clients commented that CIA® was a...

A key element of marketing is understanding how to positively influence the sales of your brand and negatively (and ethically) influence the sales of your competitors. The idea stretches from developing positioning statements to studying...

Growth planning often requires making difficult compromises. Striking a balance between addressing current business challenges, beliefs about the future and expectations from shareowners, are examples of such compromises. The final growth...

      It’s been almost 20 years since I met one of Middlegame’s long-standing champions. We mentioned Harry Bright in an earlier blog and he has been an absolute inspiration from the time that Middlegame was just an idea....

  A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON PREDICTING CAUSE AND EFFECT THOUGH AN EDUCATED GUESS AND SUBSEQUENT INFORMATION BRINGS NEW VALUE A client recently asked for a better description of the Bayesian approach that we frequently reference when...

KNOWING THE LIMITS OF TYPICAL MARKETING ANALYTICS GIVES YOU A WHOLE NEW VIEW Recently, we hosted a happy hour event for one of our clients’ analytics team. While much of the conversation revolved around shop talk, one question in particular...

HOW EVALUATING TRADE-OFFS OF POTENTIAL STRATEGIES CAN LEAD TO WINNING MARKETING SOLUTIONS Taking our company name from a key chess term, “Middlegame” describes that critical point in a match where the player is planning both offensive and...

HOW SCENARIO PLANNING KEEPS YOU PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE In a recent conversation, a potential client asked why we spent so much time talking about scenario planning as opposed to elasticities, lift coefficients, and response curves like other...

HOW THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE CAN RESHAPE YOUR MARKETING DECISIONS The primary objective of shopper response analytics is to explain purchasing behavior and then effectively utilize those learnings for commercial purposes. For the typical...

    INSIGHTS INTO THE BARRIERS AND THE OPPORTUNITIES Opportunities in emerging markets dominate nearly every investor call we’ve heard in the last couple of years. Today, FMCG firms, such as Mondelez, Nestle, and Procter &...

How can this pioneer’s work impact your decisions today? This month, Len Lodish, Samuel R. Harrell, Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, and his wife, Susan, finished another incredible bike ride as a fundraiser for ALS. This annual...

Many companies are making significant strides in leveraging massive amounts of data to drive growth and reduce cost. But it’s not uncommon for organizations to struggle with using their data to make the smartest possible decisions. We...

Welcome to the Middlegame Marketing Sciences web site A primary objective for all business leaders is to find new and sustainable growth. This requires identification and prioritization of opportunities based on expected returns. Big data...