Revenue Growth Management for Consumer Goods

Elevaite automates the analysis behind pricing, promotion, trade terms and mix decisions, so RGM teams start each planning cycle with insight and a recommendation instead of a set of reports to interpret.

The service

Automated analysis behind pricing, promotion, trade terms and mix decisions.

Who it is for

Consumer goods businesses, from single-market brands to multinational portfolios.

How it runs

Assess the team's workflows, prioritise what to automate, prove it in one area, then scale.

What you get

Insight and recommendations, plus the working tools that keep producing them.

The challenge

Why RGM analysis takes so long

Most consumer goods businesses have invested well in data and in tools. Connecting the two still falls to the RGM team, by hand, every cycle.

Sell-out data Consumer panel EPOS Trade promotion Competitor price Manual analysis by the team Decision days later The constraint sits in the middle

Good data in too many places

Sell-out, consumer panel, EPOS, trade promotion systems and competitor pricing. Each source is useful on its own. Few businesses join them on a common product hierarchy, so nobody sees the full picture at once.

Platforms that do not connect

A promotion tool, a price tracker, a mix report and a terms model, each bought separately and each answering one question in isolation. The links between them exist only in someone's head.

Tools that stop at reporting

The tools produce outputs. Someone then has to read across those outputs, reconcile them and work out what they mean, and that someone sits in the RGM team.

Most of the week goes on assembly

Your most commercially capable people spend the majority of their time pulling analysis together. That leaves too little room for shaping the decision and selling it internally, which is the part that changes the outcome.

The analysis is the constraint, and the judgement is already there. Give the RGM team the right insight at the right point in the cycle and they will make better decisions, more often, across more of the business than they can cover today.

Every pricing and promotion decision ends up on a shelf, priced against everything next to it.

Categories

Consumer goods categories covered

The four levers apply everywhere in consumer goods. How they behave, and which one holds the most value, changes a great deal by category.

Soft drinks
Beer, wine and spirits
Confectionery
Snacks
Dairy and chilled
Ambient grocery
Personal care
Cosmetics
Household care
Pet food
Infant nutrition
Health and supplements

The levers do not weigh the same everywhere. Confectionery lives on impulse and seasonal promotional depth. Pet food turns on subscription economics and pack size loyalty. Cosmetics carries premium price architecture that discounting can damage for years. Spirits sits under duty structures that change what a price move is worth. Every engagement starts from the category, then applies the analysis.

The levers

The four RGM levers

Every engagement starts from a commercial question. These are the ones RGM teams ask most often.

Pack and price architecture

  • Is the price ladder coherent across pack sizes, channels and retailers?
  • How much headroom is there before elasticity or private label switching bites?
  • Does the architecture hold on realised price as well as on list price?

Promotional effectiveness

  • What is the return on each mechanic, by retailer and by SKU?
  • Which promotions are incremental and which subsidise the base?
  • Where does depth or frequency train shoppers to wait for the deal?

Trade terms and investment

  • Where is investment earning its return, and where is value leaking?
  • How do terms compare with category and channel benchmarks?
  • How much is at stake in the next negotiation?

Mix and assortment

  • Which SKUs fund growth, and which drain margin?
  • Where do pricing and promotion decisions erode mix?
  • What should you delist, and what earns the space instead?

Competitive and market landscape

Competitor pricing and promotional activity, category dynamics and private label encroachment. This sits underneath the four levers as the baseline for every comparison, and leaving it out is the most common reason RGM answers come out wrong.

Method

Why the four levers belong together

Most RGM stacks measure each lever in its own tool. The answers look complete. They are wrong in predictable ways.

Price per litre Ladder breaks here Single 2 pack 4 pack 6 pack 12 pack
Elasticity
An elasticity estimated across promoted periods blends base and promotional response. It reflects historical promotion intensity rather than willingness to pay, which makes it unreliable as a planning parameter.
Promotional return
A baseline that ignores competitor activity produces the wrong counterfactual. If a rival ran a deal the same week, incrementality is wrong, the return is wrong, and so is the decision to repeat the promotion.
Price architecture
A ladder that looks well designed on list price can invert in market once one pack goes on deal every third week and another never does. Architecture only means something on realised price.
Mix
Pricing and promotion decisions usually cause margin drainers. The diagnosis sits in one tool and the cause sits in another, so the team manages the symptom and the cause persists.

The four levers form one system. Measured separately, every answer inherits the error from the one before it. Elevaite estimates them together, which is what makes the recommendation reliable.

How it works

How an engagement runs

Every engagement starts by learning how your RGM team works today, then automates the parts that take the most time and need the least judgement.

01

Assess

Interviews with the people doing the work, and a map of how the analysis gets built. The weekly and cyclical workflows, every data source and tool in use, what connects to what, and what someone rebuilds by hand each time.

02

Prioritise

Some work suits automation and some does not. Elevaite ranks the opportunities by value at stake against effort to build, so the first thing delivered returns the most, soonest.

03

Prove

One category, retailer or market, built on your data. Narrow enough to deliver quickly and real enough to test properly. Your team runs it through a live planning cycle before anyone commits further.

04

Scale

Once it holds, it extends to more categories, retailers and markets, including those with thinner data and smaller teams, where automated analysis is usually worth the most.

Your team keeps the judgement

The decisions stay with the people who know the customer, the category and the politics of the negotiation. No model knows what a buyer will accept in March, or which internal conversation has to happen before a price move can land.

What gets automated is the work that comes before that judgement. Assembling the sources, rebuilding the baselines, running the scenarios and identifying what has moved since anyone last looked. Your team arrives at the meeting with a recommendation and the working behind it, rather than three days of assembly still ahead of them.

A senior consultant interrogates and signs off every output. AI does the analytical heavy lifting, and a person owns the recommendation.

Comparison

Compared with consultancies and software

Consultancies leave a deck behind. Software leaves dashboards that someone still has to interpret. Elevaite leaves a recommendation and the analysis that keeps producing it.

Traditional strategy firmResource-heavy engagements ElevaiteSenior RGM specialists RGM softwareLicensed platforms
What you receiveA set of slidesInsight and recommendationsReports and dashboards
Who assembles the analysisA project team, onceAutomation, with senior reviewYour RGM team, every cycle
Category expertiseGeneralistConsumer goods onlySector agnostic
Levers coveredWhatever the scope allowedAll four, estimated togetherUsually one per platform
What remains afterwardsA deckTooling that keeps runningA licence to renew

Insights

Writing on pricing, promotions and trade

Notes on the commercial questions that decide margin in consumer goods, grounded in published category data.

See all insights

Who you work with

The founding team

You work directly with the people doing the analysis. There is no engagement team behind them.

PC Pete Church

Pete Church

Co-Founder
Net revenue management Commercial strategy Portfolio and pricing

Built his career at Mars & Co, leading European FMCG and industrial engagements for large multinationals at C-suite level. Two decades running his own advisory practice since, across commercial strategy, net revenue management and M&A. Clients have included PepsiCo, Diageo, Unilever, Bayer Consumer Healthcare and Birds Eye. A Cambridge engineer by training.

LinkedIn
AE Alex Esterkin

Alex Esterkin

Co-Founder
Pricing and RGM Growth strategy Commercial analytics

Six years at Mars & Co leading strategy engagements for global FMCG businesses with revenues from $20bn to $100bn, focused on pricing, net revenue management and commercial strategy. Earlier, four years in transformation consulting at North Highland. Has worked across European, GCC and African markets, including cross-channel trade terms and pack price architecture.

LinkedIn

Get in touch

If your RGM team spends more of the week assembling analysis than acting on it, that is the conversation worth having. Send over the question you are trying to answer and Elevaite will come back with an approach.

Web
elevaite-strategy.com
Location
London, United Kingdom