Best Practices

Booz & Company recently conducted the bi-annual refresh of its Customer Planning and Trade Spend study, revealing that a majority of consumer goods companies believe they spend too many resources on trade promotion management and are unhappy with the quality of the tools/systems available to manage investments. Executives from Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods and McCormick & Company discuss the pain points, best practices and tips for better efficiency in customer planning and trade spend.

Because we know it's important to stay on top of your retail customer's strengths and weaknesses, we're bringing you new research findings from our sister publication, RIS News, which benchmarks the progress of omnichannel strategies in retail.

Sophisticated sweets, savory yogurt and bolder burgers are just three of the inspirational food trends to watch for in 2014 as identified by Campbells Culinary & Baking Institute (CCBI), a global network of highly-trained chefs, bakers and culinary professionals at Campbell Soup Company.

As much as reputation leaders (most frequently the senior communicator, chief marketing officer or the head of business strategy) would like to be able to tell CEOs and board members that everything is under control, the fact is when it comes to stakeholder relationship management, everything is not under control. Although most companies agree that reputation management is important, relatively few have figured out what to do about it.

There is no industry where women play a more dominant role as workers, producers and consumers than the retail and consumer products industry. However, a new report shows that the number of women that sit on the boards of consumer goods and retail companies is not where it needs to be given women's aggregate market impact.

Executives from Kraft Foods and Safeway divulge ROI details from their collaborative data sharing initiatives, and add real-world context to findings of the 2013 Retail / Supplier Shared Data Study. Whether you have been working with downstream data for a while or are new to the effort, this discussion provides valuable insights.

Avon's Mega Effects Mascara features a new brush that can be used at 12 different angles.

CGT Editor Ali Ackerman gives you a sneak peek into the trends and topics discussed in this month's issue.