Why Granular Planning is a Game Changer for CPG brands

Why Granular Planning is a Game Changer for CPG brands

Are you harnessing the power of granular, event-based planning? Learn why it's a total game changer: 👇


The traditional, top-down approach to trade promotion management often relies on high-level data averages, which can obscure the real drivers of success and failure. Event-based planning, on the other hand, provides a detailed, bottom-up view, allowing CPG brands to optimize every aspect of their promotional strategy.

Why is it transformative?


When it comes to planning promotions, brands must decide on the types of promotions (discounts, displays, BOGOs, etc.), the timing, and the specific retail locations or regions where they’ll run. This process typically involves collaboration across departments (sales, marketing, finance) and should consider market trends, seasonality, and consumer behavior.

1. Tailored Strategy for Specific Events With granular planning, brands can treat each promotional event as unique, customizing the promotion type, timing, and budget based on store-level or regional performance.

How Modus Helps: Instead of using top-line averages or broad promotional strategies, bottom-up planning takes a more granular approach by looking at promotions at the individual store, region, or event level. This allows for a more tailored and accurate promotional plan. For instance, if your brand sees that a particular promotion performs exceptionally well in one region but not in another, then you can adjust your strategy on a store-by-store basis. This level of planning- focused on individual promotional events- allows you to fine-tune your strategy for maximum impact, rather than applying a blanket approach across all markets. 


2. Budgeting and Spend Management: Improve your ROI & Trade Spend Efficiency Allocating budgets for promotions is a critical step in TPM. It’s about deciding where to invest promotional dollars to maximize return while balancing margins and sales growth. This also includes tracking and managing the overall trade spend throughout the campaign to ensure brands stay within budget. By drilling down into the details of each promotion, brands can identify and eliminate inefficiencies, leading to better returns on trade spend and more effective promotions.

How Modus Helps: When you budget based on detailed, event-level data, you gain a clearer understanding of how each promotion impacts your bottom line. Granular planning helps you allocate spend more intelligently, based on historical data from similar promotions. 

  • Allocate more budget to high-performing promotions or regions.
  • Avoid overspending on promotions that are less effective.
  • Anticipate trade deductions, retailer fees, and other costs with more accuracy. Ultimately, this drives more efficient budget management, which ensures that every promotional dollar is working as hard as possible.


3. Accurate, Real-Time Adjustments. Performance tracking is all about monitoring promotions in real-time and post-event to understand how well they’re working. Bottom-up data gives brands the ability to make adjustments during the promotion itself, responding to real-time performance insights. This adaptability is crucial for maximizing the impact of each promotional event.  Are they driving incremental sales? Is the trade spend yielding a strong ROI? This step is crucial for making quick adjustments during a promotion and for learning what works for future planning.

How Modus Helps: Granular, bottom-up planning allows CPG brands to track promotional performance at the most detailed level—down to individual stores, specific SKUs, or regional segments. Instead of just looking at overall sales numbers, brands can track:

  • Incremental sales and promotional lift at a highly specific level.
  • How individual retailers, stores, or regions are performing.
  • Variances in performance between different types of promotions (e.g., coupons vs. in-store displays).

This detailed performance data enables brands to make real-time adjustments during the promotion and provides powerful insights for future event-based planning. This level of tracking also makes it easier to pinpoint issues—such as underperforming stores or ineffective promotional mechanics—so they can be corrected swiftly.


4. Post Event Analysis: Long-Term Learning and Optimization

After a promotion ends, post-event analysis helps brands compare actual performance against expectations, and every promotion becomes a learning opportunity. Did the promotion achieve the incremental sales goals? Was the ROI as expected? What were the key drivers of success or failure? Refine your future promotional strategies based on detailed, event-level insights, rather than relying on assumptions or generalities. 

How Modus Helps: Bottom-up planning improves post-event analysis by giving brands a much clearer picture of WHY a promotion performed the way it did. By breaking down performance at an event level (rather than relying on high-level aggregated data), brands can:This level of granular analysis ensures that post-event insights aren’t lost in averages or assumptions, but rather reflect the actual drivers of performance, allowing for smarter planning in the future.

  • Understand which promotions, regions, or stores drove the most value.
  • Retailer Level Spend Analysis: Most brands only have insight into their distributor spend actuals and don't truly understand the retailers that are driving "the overspend at UNFI", for example.  Understanding which retailers are truly impacting the overall trade rate for the company will allow you to redistribute funds when necessary and adjust your overall trade spend with a more strategic approach.
  • Identify patterns in promotion success or failure (e.g., product bundling worked better in certain regions).
  • Use this detailed insight to refine and optimize future promotion strategies.


By incorporating a bottom-up, granular, event-based planning into your TPM strategy,  your brand can unlock new levels of performance optimization.

By getting detailed, real-time insights into every aspect of your promotional events, your brand can make smarter decisions, spend more efficiently, and ultimately drive greater sales growth. For those navigating the complexities of trade spend, this level of precision is not just a competitive advantage—it’s essential for staying ahead in today’s fast-paced market.

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