Planning season shouldn't mean weeks lost in spreadsheets. Yet most category managers and RGM teams go into the new year with budgets built on siloed data, manual simulations and last year's assumptions.
The cost shows up later: missed opportunities, trade spend in the wrong places and slower launches.
What a good plan starts from
- A full market read across every retailer, on the same weeks, the same products and the same measures, so the plan doesn't change depending on whose spreadsheet you open.
- Last year's promotions, judged honestly. Base against incremental volume for every promotion cycle, so you repeat the ones that paid back and drop the ones that didn't.
- The price picture. Where you sit against competitors and own label, and how often the market moves.
- Where the gaps are. Distribution gaps by retailer and store are often the cheapest growth in next year's plan.
With Core, that view is already built and refreshed with every data drop, so planning starts from the answer rather than the data pull. With Intelligence, Research turns it into a written brief you can export to PowerPoint in your own template.