Collaboration Becomes the New Currency in Trade Promotions

Retailers understand these challenges, and many are investing to improve collaboration. Family Dollar launched an initiative to better align inventory data across its supplier network to eliminate these issues, ensuring that analysts are all working through the same forecast. 

Though less common, Guard says his organization has supported data applications in which CPG brands and retailers collaborate on joint forecasting models, shared promotion optimization algorithms and co-developed customer segmentation strategies. 

In those cases, relationships extend beyond transactional data exhanges to more effective strategic partnerships.

AI to Simplify the Complexity

Artificial intelligence has transformed TPM, introducing new efficiencies and optimizing the entire trade promotion journey. 

Over 68% of large-scale CPG companies in the U.S. had already implemented TPM platforms as of last year, and 54% of them were using AI for campaign optimization, according to Global Growth Insights. 

Sixty-three percent of U.S.-based enterprises also integrated their systems into their CRM and ERP platforms to drive improved decision-making across their processes.

PepsiCo, for example, is using agentic AI agents enabled by Salesforce to create targeted and automated marketing, garnering deeper insights into consumer behaviors and preferences to optimize campaigns and promotions. 

This builds on advanced capabilities to use real-time advertising performance insights to develop clearer audience segmentation through an agentic partnership with AWS.

Oftentimes, as is the case with PepsiCo, these capabilities are being built directly on cloud-native platforms to help scale efforts more quickly. 

By integrating AI and machine learning directly into these platforms, CPGs can avoid exporting data to separate analytics tools, allowing them to run predictive models, scenario planning and optimization algorithms directly on their shared data sets, he notes.