Marketing planning in the CPG industry was once a predictable annual exercise where brands developed comprehensive strategies in PowerPoint presentations and executed them throughout the year with minimal adjustments. Today, the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environment demands continuous planning cycles that can adapt to retailer demands, market disruptions, and emerging opportunities in real time.
In this conversation, we explore how Shopperations, a purpose-built platform for CPG marketing operations, is helping brands transition from reactive annual planning to proactive continuous optimization through proper data taxonomy, integrated systems, and closed-loop processes that connect planning, execution, measurement, and replanning in seamless cycles that drive better business outcomes and free marketers to focus on strategic and creative work.
Key Takeaways
- Replace annual planning cycles with continuous optimization processes that can adapt to the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environment in real time.
- Establish proper data taxonomy and systems of record before investing in analytics to ensure raw materials are organized and accessible for meaningful analysis and decision-making.
- Integrate retail media planning with shopper marketing teams rather than maintaining separate silos, as retail media now represents 70-80% of many client budgets.
- Implement purpose-built systems that eliminate 52% of marketers’ time currently spent on administrative tasks like responding to internal requests and creating status reports.
The Death of Annual Planning
The traditional approach to marketing planning, where brands developed comprehensive annual strategies and executed them with minimal adjustments throughout the year, has become not just ineffective but potentially damaging in today’s rapidly changing business environment. The shift from predictable market conditions to what industry professionals call the VUCA world has fundamentally altered the requirements for successful marketing planning and execution.
VUCA, an acronym standing for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, perfectly captures the current state of the CPG marketing landscape. Market conditions change rapidly due to factors ranging from global supply chain disruptions to sudden shifts in consumer behavior, making static annual plans obsolete before they can be fully implemented.
“The once-a-year planning is the way of the past. The world has become crazy. I like the terminology, VUCA world. VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and it’s getting worse every year,” explains Olga Yurovski, Founder and CEO of Shopperations.
The power dynamics within the industry have also shifted dramatically, with retailers gaining unprecedented influence over how brand dollars are allocated and spent. This retailer empowerment means that marketing plans must be flexible enough to accommodate joint business planning discussions, retailer demands, and emerging partnership opportunities that cannot be predicted months in advance.
The Continuous Planning Imperative
Modern CPG marketing requires a fundamental shift from annual planning cycles to continuous optimization processes that can adapt to changing conditions in real time. This transformation goes beyond simply updating plans more frequently; it requires building systems and processes that enable rapid decision-making based on current market conditions and performance data.
The complexity of modern shopper marketing, which now encompasses traditional in-store activities, ecommerce optimization, and retail media buying, demands coordination across multiple stakeholders with competing priorities. Brand managers continuously introduce new product launches and competitive responses, while sales teams identify emerging opportunities with retail partners that require immediate action.
“Plans change all the time, and plans are contingent on joint business planning meetings. They’re contingent on market situations. We have lots of new things that are being thrown at us, like tariffs, like digitization, and AI now. So we constantly have to reevaluate and reassess what we’re doing,” Yurovski notes.
This constant change creates challenges for marketing teams that must balance strategic planning with tactical execution while maintaining accountability to multiple internal stakeholders who expect transparency and results from marketing investments.
Building the Foundation: Data Taxonomy and Systems of Record
One of the most critical yet often overlooked aspects of effective marketing planning is establishing proper data taxonomy and systems of record before attempting to implement advanced analytics or optimization strategies. Many organizations make the mistake of jumping directly to analytics without first organizing their foundational data structures, leading to inefficient processes and unreliable insights.
The challenge begins with the basic question of where marketing campaigns and executions are tracked and managed. Without centralized systems of record, marketing teams often resort to disconnected spreadsheets, shared folders, and inconsistent naming conventions that make comprehensive analysis nearly impossible.
“My first question is, do you have a system of record? Where do you keep your campaigns? Where do you plan? Where do you track your executions? Do you have raw materials for analytics? Because if you don’t have raw materials, they will have to go and collect them by hand, and it’s extremely time-consuming, extremely expensive, and the data accuracy suffers,” Yurovski explains.
The process of establishing proper data taxonomy requires deliberate collaboration across multiple stakeholders to develop naming conventions, campaign structures, and tracking methodologies that serve the needs of all teams involved in planning and execution. This foundational work, while not glamorous, is essential for enabling the type of rapid analysis and optimization that modern marketing demands.
The Raw Materials Challenge
The concept of “raw materials” for analytics extends beyond simply having data available; it encompasses having data that is properly structured, consistently labeled, and easily accessible for analysis. Many marketing teams discover that their data exists in formats that require extensive manual processing before it can be used for meaningful insights.
Common challenges include working with fifteen different vendors who each maintain their own file structures and naming conventions, creating a fragmented data landscape that requires significant effort to consolidate and analyze. This fragmentation not only slows down analysis but also introduces opportunities for errors and inconsistencies that can undermine decision-making.
“Just spoke to one potential client who says we have fifteen shared folders on SharePoint where we have files by different vendors because we work with fifteen different vendors. And all of those files are disjointed. They have a completely different structure, naming conventions,” Yurovski describes.
The solution requires establishing unified taxonomies that define how tactics, campaigns, initiatives, vendors, and products are named and categorized across all systems and partners. This standardization enables rapid analysis and optimization while ensuring that results can be easily mapped back to original plans for continuous improvement.
Breaking Down Silos: Integrating Retail Media with Shopper Marketing
The evolution of digital marketing capabilities has led many CPG organizations to create specialized teams focused on emerging channels like e-commerce and retail media. While this approach makes sense during the early stages of capability development, maintaining these silos long-term can limit strategic effectiveness and create inefficiencies in budget allocation and execution.
The natural progression for successful organizations involves integrating specialized capabilities back into core commercial teams once the technologies and strategies become mainstream. This integration is particularly critical for retail media, which has grown from an experimental channel to a dominant component of many marketing budgets.
“Once it becomes mainstream, once you gain experience and insight on how to operationalize it and commercialize it, it has to be decentralized because it becomes part of your day-to-day conversations with retailers,” Yurovski explains.
The integration challenge is compounded by the fact that retailers themselves are merging their traditional and e-commerce buying teams, creating unified commercial relationships that require coordinated responses from brand partners. Organizations that maintain separate teams for different channels risk missing opportunities for strategic coordination and may find themselves at a disadvantage in retailer negotiations.
The Retail Media Imperative
The growth of retail media has been so dramatic that it now represents the majority of many clients’ marketing budgets, fundamentally changing the skill requirements and strategic focus of shopper marketing teams. This shift creates both opportunities and challenges for marketing professionals who must adapt to new technologies and measurement approaches.
“Seventy to eighty percent of our clients’ budget now goes into retail media. If you wanna do omnichannel shopper marketing, you have to understand retail media. Otherwise, you’re obsolete and irrelevant,” Yurovski states bluntly.
The integration of retail media into shopper marketing requires teams to develop new competencies in media buying, programmatic advertising, and digital measurement while maintaining their expertise in traditional shopper marketing tactics. This evolution demands both individual skill development and organizational restructuring to support coordinated planning and execution.
Successful integration enables shopper marketing teams to elevate their strategic conversations with retailers, moving beyond tactical execution to comprehensive partnership discussions that encompass in-store, ecommerce, and media opportunities. Teams that embrace this evolution typically see their budgets and influence grow, while those that resist risk marginalization.
The Administrative Burden and Path to Efficiency
One of the most significant yet underappreciated challenges facing CPG marketing teams is the enormous amount of time spent on administrative tasks that add little strategic value but are necessary for organizational coordination and accountability. Research indicates that these non-value-added activities consume more than half of marketers’ working time, creating substantial opportunity costs.
The administrative burden stems from the need to serve multiple internal stakeholders who require regular updates, reports, and analyses in different formats and timeframes. Brand managers, sales teams, finance departments, and senior leadership all have legitimate needs for information about marketing plans and performance, but their requests often require manual compilation and formatting that diverts resources from strategic work.
“Fifty-two percent of marketers’ time in the CPG shopper industry is spent on admin work, responding to emails, summarizing data, putting together PowerPoints just to inform internal stakeholders on the status of things,” Yurovski reveals.
This administrative overhead creates a vicious cycle where marketing teams become increasingly reactive, spending more time reporting on activities than planning and optimizing them. The constant stream of internal requests for updates and analyses prevents teams from focusing on the strategic and creative work that drives business results and professional satisfaction.
The Self-Service Solution
The path to reducing administrative burden involves implementing systems that enable self-service access to marketing information, allowing stakeholders to find answers to routine questions without requiring manual intervention from marketing teams. This approach requires upfront investment in system design and stakeholder training but pays dividends through improved efficiency and faster access to information.
Effective self-service systems provide stakeholders with the ability to access real-time information about campaign status, budget utilization, and performance metrics through intuitive interfaces that require minimal training. This capability transforms routine information requests from time-consuming manual tasks into automated processes that benefit both requesters and marketing teams.
“What Shoppperations offers is a system where you plan once, and you plan pretty granularly so anybody who comes in should understand what it is that you’ve just planned and where it’s standing. Any question that comes in from your manager, from finance, from brands, from sales, they can be answered in a matter of a couple of clicks,” Yurovski explains.
The transformation from manual reporting to self-service systems enables marketing teams to focus their time and expertise on activities that drive business value, including strategic planning, creative development, and optimization based on performance insights.
Future of Marketing Operations: AI and Automation
The integration of artificial intelligence and automation technologies into marketing operations represents the next frontier in the evolution from manual, reactive processes to intelligent, proactive systems that can optimize performance and guide decision-making with minimal human intervention. This transformation builds on the foundation of proper data organization and system integration to create increasingly sophisticated capabilities.
Current AI applications in marketing operations focus primarily on improving access to information through natural language interfaces that allow users to query systems conversationally rather than learning complex reporting tools. This capability removes barriers to data access and enables more stakeholders to find answers independently.
“AI is going to enable users to query the system instead of building reports by dragging fields into rows and columns themselves. They should be able to just ask a question in natural language and get an insight back,” Yurovski describes.
The evolution toward more sophisticated AI applications includes automated plan optimization based on historical performance data, predictive modeling for campaign outcomes, and intelligent recommendations for budget allocation and tactical selection. These capabilities require substantial data history and sophisticated modeling to deliver reliable results.
The Agentic Future
The ultimate vision for AI-powered marketing operations involves agentic systems that can automatically generate optimal marketing plans based on business objectives, market conditions, and historical performance data. These systems would integrate planning, execution, and optimization into seamless workflows that require minimal human intervention for routine decisions.
“Training the model, figuring out marketing best practices, creating enough data to teach the model about this particular client’s performance, their category, their marketing strategy, that’s what’s gonna take time,” Yurovski acknowledges.
The development of these capabilities requires collaboration between marketing operations platforms, analytics providers, and execution systems to create integrated workflows that can automatically optimize across multiple channels and tactics. The goal is to free marketers from routine optimization tasks so they can focus on strategic thinking, creative development, and relationship building.
This transformation represents a fundamental shift in the role of marketing professionals, from tactical executors to strategic orchestrators who guide AI systems and focus on the uniquely human aspects of marketing that drive long-term brand success and customer relationships.
