Have you made a plan to hit your goals by year end? Every new year offers a great opportunity to decide on some specific CPG business goals within your overall roadmap that will contribute to your company’s growth during the year.
In addition, doing your yearly CPG planning helps keep your business on track when the more granular, agile, and adaptive decisions have to be made quarter by quarter as the year progresses.
However, as we start 2022, you’ll already have noticed that CPG trading conditions are still in flux, despite the pandemic possibly coming to an end! There’s a lot of unpredictability and challenges concerning
- customers,
- the financial climate, and
- supply chains, sales forecasting, supply and demand, and everything involved with those.
Moreover, these areas are intrinsically linked and affect each other. This adds complexity to financial and sales forecasting and therefore to your goal planning. Here, we’ll look at these three challenges, That way, you can take them into account as you plan to hit your business goals.
Plan for Changing Consumer Habits
As you plan to reach your business goals in 2022, you therefore need to note which consumer habits were temporarily fuelled by the pandemic and which will continue.
You also need to be on the lookout for emerging habits that may be caused by the growth of things like multi channels, online grocery buying, or consumers’ renewed interest in (for instance) travel, restaurants, theatres, partying etc.
Plan for the Effects of Inflation
These are predicted to be prominent in 2022. Some consumers will therefore have less disposable income. Their buying choices will change. To plan ahead for this, your CPG business will need to think of:
- Introducing new ways to shop and pay. This might be by installment – to account for customers’ income uncertainty.
- Cost-effective strategies and price management of your consumer goods. This will keep the most vulnerable customer segments loyal to your brand.
- Prioritization of planning for different scenarios in each product category that may show up as inflation rises and your CPG marketing has to adapt.
Plan for Cross-Functional Collaboration
Supply chain issues have been disrupting both CPGs and retailers. As a result of two years of very different and specific demands on the industry, CPGs can expect to face further challenges in these areas in 2022.
These issues will not only be in shipping and labor costs, and changing demand from consumers due reduced income. They will also result from the slewed historic data (from the pandemic) that you’ve gathered and which affect your forecasting.
To counteract these challenges, we suggest your CPG business goals in 2022 must include cross-functional collaboration. You might look at strategies such as:
- Building data-sharing capabilities and supply chain visibility between yourself, your retailers and your suppliers. You can then use AI-driven analytics to help you predict potential early shifts in demand and supply that may affect your CPG business goals.
- Planning for collaborative strategies with your trusted retail partners in a win-win situation. When each party is responsible and accountable for the agreed plans, you can both more easily avoid negative results.
Plan to Hit Your CPG Business Goals!
As 2022 progresses, all CPG companies can expect an unpredictable economy. Not planning to hit your business goals is planning to fail!
At Momentum CPG we have 120+ years of sales and marketing leadership in CPGs – we can help your business hit your goals. Schedule a call with us today!