Master Essential Skills & Topics for Retail and CPG

When assessing a participant’s business or a retailer’s business, it starts with understanding how the overall business is performing – volume, share, profit, and growth – vs. targets and vs. competition. Once learners establish how the business is performing, they should tie it in with understanding what shopper behavior is driving the results. In this course, learners will gain the ability to create a vision or to understand the total enterprise and how the parts work.

"Shopper" is the focal point of everything these days. Advancements in CatMan 2.0, new data and technology drive the need for us to integrate Shopper more and more in everything that we do in category management. In this course, learners will be given perspective on ways that they can start to better reflect Shopper in the work that they do.

"Roles that are inter-dependent should be in the same organization. Shopper insights, shopper marketing and category management are inter-dependent in creating the necessary output for the ultimate client (the retailer), the category platform." (Quoted from CatMan 2.0™) As we have been “preaching” to our students for a few years now, the Shopper can’t be kept separate from the category management process – it needs to be integrated into all steps of the process! In this course, participants learn more about this important change to category management, and how to incorporate the Shopper into their category management foundations.

This course is all about the Shopper, including ways for learners to incorporate them into their work. With presenters from Video Mining and SwiftIQ we'll run through two hands-on case studies in which they will draw Shopper insights from a set of data and learn how to turn these insights into action.

This course addresses the power and importance of Shopper Insights in today’s world, and how Shopper understanding can help drive growth in your business. By the end of this course, learners are able to define Shopper Insights from both a category management perspective and a broader organizational perspective, explain the different perspectives of Shopper Insights for both retailers and manufacturers, articulate the power of Shopper Insights and explain why it is a critical function in today’s organizations, explain the difference between Shopper facts and insights, and identify their organization’s level of Shopper insights through a shopper insights framework.

Business acumen requires an understanding of finance, strategy, and decision-making. Most managers and employees, however, are responsible for specific areas, and they have little understanding of the impact their decisions have on other areas. In this course, we walk through a big picture perspective to help learners improve their business acumen and, ultimately, increase alignment with their multi-functional teams and external customers.

Are your presentations conveying data in an understandable and compelling way?

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data. By using visual elements such as charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization enables us to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data. Data visualization helps to tell stories, getting rid of the noise and highlighting the useful information. It is where art and science meet in category management and shopper insights - the data and analytics are the science, and it needs to work together with the visuals (or art) for great storytelling. In Part 1 (521), we make connections between creative storytelling and analysis, with some great examples of data visualization for different data sets. In Part 2 (522), we show learners how to create data viz for conceptual ideas and non-data outputs, and how to use diagrams and visual metaphors to illustrate relationships and clarify concepts to reinforce their presentation points.