Why sensible decisions in Marketing, Sales, Supply and Finance can add up to an experience nobody would ever sign off on!

Executive Summary

Customer experience gaps usually form between departments, where Marketing, Sales, Supply and Finance each make sensible decisions that add up to an experience nobody intended.

Drawing on research from Ipsos, PwC, Salesforce and Deloitte, and on the troubled 2024 Sonos app launch, this article shows why fixing problems where they surface rarely works, why mid-level managers spot the gaps first, and how tracing one recurring complaint back to the decision behind it can reveal what really needs to change.

Prefer to listen?

When good decisions add up to a poor experience

One idea from my SOCAP talk in Chicago last week stayed with me longer than the rest. I suspect it’s because I’ve watched it play out in many companies over the years. Every department in a business can honestly believe it serves the customer. It has a scorecard to prove it, while the customer has a rather different story to tell. That story is usually about customer experience gaps: the spaces between departments where nobody is quite in charge.

Poor performance rarely explains it, and neither does that tired word, silos. Most of the individual decisions are perfectly rational. Marketing protects the brand and Sales keeps the retailer happy. Finance defends margin, while Supply cuts complexity. Customer Service operates within the policies and tools handed to it. Each function can hit every target it was set. The combination, though, can produce customer experience gaps that no one designed and no one owns.

The numbers suggest this is far from a niche problem. Ipsos surveyed 735 CX and EX professionals across 45 markets for its Global Voices of Experience 2026 study, and only 57% said their organisation consistently delivers experiences aligned with its brand promise.

PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey polled 406 executives and 5,511 US consumers. It found that 70% of those executives believe customer expectations are moving faster than their company can adapt. Meanwhile, 52% of the consumers had stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience with its products or services.

When more than four in ten organisations can’t say they deliver their own promise, and half of all consumers have already walked away from a brand, customer experience gaps deserve far more attention

The customer never sees your org. chart

Companies manage performance vertically, and for good reasons. You need accountability, deep expertise, and someone who owns the number. I’ve never believed the answer to every customer problem is to dissolve the functions and throw everyone into one giant cross-functional team; that usually just creates a new set of gaps somewhere else.

Customers, however, experience the business horizontally. Someone picking up one of your products has no idea that Marketing made one call, Supply another, and Revenue Management a third, nor should they care. They see a single brand name on the pack and assume, quite reasonably, that the company behind it has joined the dots.

Take a brand built around easy family meals. Marketing has done solid work on the consumer and sharpened the promise around reliability and convenience. Supply has, at the same time, cut back an over-complicated portfolio and improved line efficiency. Then Sales lands a strong promotion with a major retailer, again for entirely sound commercial reasons. The promotion works, demand jumps, and the family-size pack (the format that matters most to the target) is suddenly hard to find, because it was one of the formats trimmed in the complexity review.

There’s no villain in that story. Every team did its job, and the promotion numbers probably look excellent in the monthly review. The shopper facing an empty shelf won’t be handing out prizes for functional excellence, though. What she experiences is one of the most common customer experience gaps in CPG: the space between three good decisions.

This matters because companies tend to fix customer experience gaps where they surface, which is rarely where they start. Customer Service gets a new script, Sales has a word with the retailer, Marketing tweaks the messaging, and someone commissions research into falling satisfaction. All of that may help a little; none of it touches the decision that caused the problem in the first place.

Customers already feel how fragmented you are

Salesforce has been tracking this for years. In the fifth edition of its State of the Connected Customer report, 85% of customers said they expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 60% said it generally feels as though they’re dealing with separate departments rather than one company. I find that figure, and the customer experience gaps behind it, far more revealing. Customers are perfectly happy for you to have specialist teams, as long as the structure stays your problem and never becomes theirs.

You can hear it whenever a consumer is told “that’s handled by another department”, as if that were somehow reassuring. You see it when the e-commerce team can’t explain an in-store promotion, when Consumer Services has no visibility of an order, or when a shopper has to repeat details that already sit somewhere in your systems. From the inside, the explanation is obvious: different system, different budget, different team.

From the outside, it’s one company letting them down.

That’s why I think we spend too long debating who owns the customer, and far too little time asking who owns the consequences. When one function’s sensible decision makes another part of the experience worse, whose problem is it? Ask that at your next leadership meeting and watch the temperature in the room change.

Sonos and the cost of a reasonable decision

Sonos is a useful case precisely because its strategy wasn’t foolish. In May 2024 the company launched a rebuilt app, designed to modernise the platform and make it easier to add features in future. Those were sensible ambitions for a business whose software had become hard to extend.

Customers saw it very differently. The

The post Your Customers Live in the Gaps Between Your Departments first appeared on c3centricity.

Executive summary

Too many CPG companies run product renovation strategies that start with cost savings. Procurement removes material, a pack gets lighter or a portion shrinks; then the change is relaunched as “new” and priced higher. Consumers are noticing. In 2025, Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg added 77 products to its list of hidden price increases, with an average rise of 28.4%, and almost 35,000 people voted on the worst offender.

The risk is higher in 2026 for two reasons. Deloitte classes 47% of consumers globally as “value seekers” who compare carefully before they buy. France and Austria now require retailers to flag shrunken products on the shelf, so shoppers increasingly compare before buying.

Short-term sales often hold while trust quietly falls, which is why so many companies miss the damage. The remedy is one extra approval in your product renovation strategy: someone has to sign off consumer value, with the old and new products side by side and both prices visible. This article shows how the four QC2™ lenses (company, customer understanding, brands and processes) can test a renovation before shoppers do.

Early in 2025, Milka’s Alpenmilch bar got thinner. It dropped from 100g to 90g, while its shelf price went from €1.49 to €1.99. That’s a hidden price rise of over 48%, on one of Europe’s best-known chocolate bars.

Shoppers noticed. When the consumer advice centre in Hamburg asked the public to vote for its “Mogelpackung des Jahres” (roughly, the most deceptive pack of the year), Milka took two-thirds of the vote. Some 34,731 people took part, the highest turnout in six years, over a ten-gram change to a chocolate bar. To add insult to injury, the new weight was often hidden behind the outer display carton on shelf.

Shrinkflation is nothing new. What caught my attention was the company Milka kept on that shortlist. Several of those products didn’t shrink quietly; they were relaunched, promoted and priced as something new.

Prefer to listen?

The renovation premium

Anyone who’s worked in CPG marketing knows the renovation calendar. I worked to one for decades, at Nestlé, Gillette and Philip Morris. A brand gets a new pack, a tweaked recipe or a fresh claim, and with it, a new price. Few people question the price, because “new” has always justified “more”. For many companies, that assumption sits quietly at the heart of their product renovation strategy.

Sometimes that’s fair. A genuinely better product can cost more to make, and consumers will often pay for real improvement.

Trouble starts when the renovation begins life as a cost saving. A lighter bottle. A thinner film. An outer carton quietly removed. A slightly smaller portion. Each change lowers the cost per unit; then marketing wraps it in a “new look”, and the price goes up anyway. What started as an efficiency project in procurement reaches the shelf as a premium.

Packaging is a particularly tempting place to do this, since a “greener” pack sounds like a gift to the consumer. Be careful with the maths, though. Switching from plastic to paper often costs more; one 2026 industry estimate puts paper-based materials at 10–20% more per kilogram than commodity plastic films. Removing material is different. Take away a carton or a layer of shrink film and the saving is real, and so is the temptation to charge more for the “new” pack.

None of this is new. Back in 2012, Consumer Reports readers flagged a coffee sold under a “New! Flavor Lock Pack” banner; the new pack used less plastic, and the story ran in a feature on packaging “gotchas”. Fourteen years on, the language on pack has changed. The playbook hasn’t.

Companies have used this cover for years. Shrinkage is often explained away by the health benefits of smaller portions or the environmental benefits of less packaging. Both can be true. They’re also very convenient.

What the watchdogs found

Look at the rest of the Hamburg shortlist.

Dr. Oetker’s cheese-crumble baking mix is the case every renovation team should study. The old pack held 730g and cost €3.99. Its replacement held 370g and cost €3.79, so the shelf price actually fell. Per kilo, though, shoppers were paying almost twice as much. The smaller pack came back as a new product under the line “Klassiker neu interpretiert” (“a classic reinterpreted”), although the consumer group says the recipe was virtually unchanged.

Here’s the detail I find most telling. On other products, such as its muesli and pudding mixes, Dr. Oetker had printed a clear notice: “Weniger Inhalt. Unveränderte Qualität.” (“Less content. Unchanged quality.”). The company knew exactly how to be honest about a smaller pack. On this one, they presented the reduction as innovation instead.

Knorr’s Penne Pomodoro Mozzarella advertised more content on pack. The price rose faster still, an increase of 29%.

Kölln’s XXL chocolate oat muesli had a lower shelf price, yet worked out almost 30% dearer. The consumer group was especially critical because Kölln had flagged quantity cuts on other products, but not on this one.

None of these is an isolated case. The Hamburg centre added 77 products to its list of hidden price increases in 2025, the second-highest number since it began counting. The average hidden increase was 28.4%.

Most of my examples come from Germany, simply because German consumer groups track these changes publicly and name the brands. I’d be surprised if the practice stopped at the border.

Why it works, until it doesn’t

Here’s the uncomfortable part. In the short term, it often pays.

Research on shrinkflation suggests consumers are deterred more by price rises than by smaller packs, and some would rather get less at the old price. Even after the Milka backlash, reports suggest Mondelez still managed to grow sales.

Yet the damage often shows up later, and somewhere else. A Canadian shopper told CBC she only discovered her Dawn dish soap had shrunk by 10% because an older bottle happened to be sitting in her

The post Did Your Relaunch Give Consumers More, or Just Charge Them More? first appeared on c3centricity.

Executive Summary

Most organisations are not short on answers, they’re short on properly defined problems.

That may sound obvious, but it becomes much less obvious once a real business issue lands on the table and half a dozen experienced managers start trying to solve it. Sales softens, so the immediate conversation turns to promotion or price. A new product under-performs, and Marketing starts talking about awareness. Complaints rise, and Customer Service wants to rewrite the script. Margin slips, and Finance wants savings. Everybody is busy, everybody has a view, and the meeting quickly fills with proposed actions.

The awkward question is whether anyone has established what is actually wrong.

I was reminded of this recently while working with the leadership team of a beverage company in West Africa. I had built a fictional commercial case for them around a possible new drink, giving them enough facts to make the situation feel real, but not enough to make the answer obvious. The point was not to see who could come up with the smartest recommendation fastest. It was to see whether they could resist the urge to recommend anything at all until they had separated what they genuinely knew from what they were assuming.

That sounds simple. It wasn’t!

Experienced managers are very good at recognising patterns, and that is both a strength and a risk. Once you have seen dozens of launches, retailer negotiations, pricing problems and consumer shifts, you begin to think you know what a familiar-looking situation means. Often you do. Sometimes you don’t. The expensive mistakes usually happen when confidence arrives before diagnosis.

There is plenty of evidence that companies struggle with this. PwC has reported that 57% of executives believe they are missing opportunities because their organisations cannot make decisions quickly enough, while Deloitte’s 2026 work on decision-making found that 57% of organisations still operate at low decision-making maturity and only 5% consider themselves leaders.

Speed matters. Of course it does. Nobody running a business wants to spend three months studying a problem that should have been resolved in three days. But speed only helps when the problem has been framed correctly. Move quickly on the wrong diagnosis, and all you have done is reach the wrong answer sooner.

That is why good problem solving in business starts before the solution. It starts with the discipline to ask what is known, what is assumed, what is missing, and which of those gaps could genuinely change the decision.

Why Problem Solving in Business Goes Wrong Before the Solution Starts

Most managers are trained, formally or otherwise, to be useful. Useful people give answers. They may make recommendations and move things forward, but they don’t usually win admiration by saying, “I’m not sure we understand the problem yet.”

That creates a bias towards action, and in many businesses the bias gets stronger the more senior someone becomes. Senior managers are expected to recognise patterns quickly. They have history. They have scar tissue. They remember what happened the last time a retailer pushed back, or when a particular category slowed, or when a launch struggled because the proposition was too complicated.

Experience is valuable precisely because it gives us shortcuts. The problem comes when the shortcut becomes the diagnosis.

A drop in sales after a price increase may look like a price problem, but perhaps the increase coincided with weaker distribution, a competitor promotion, a pack change, lower media support or simply a seasonal effect the team has ignored. A weak launch may look like an awareness issue, but awareness may be perfectly healthy while repeat purchase is poor. A rise in complaints may point to product quality, but it may also be caused by packaging, unclear instructions, service failure or an expectation the brand itself created.

The same symptom can support several explanations, and each explanation sends the business in a different direction.

That’s where money disappears. If the team decides the issue is awareness, they buy media. If the issue is value, they change price. If they decide that the issue is distribution, Sales gets involved. And when they see the issue is in product experience, R&D or Operations gets dragged in.

But if the issue is relevance, the problem may be much bigger than any of those individually. A wrong diagnosis followed by excellent execution is still a wrong decision. It is just a more expensive one.

Problem Definition Gets Harder When Assumptions Start Sounding Like Facts

The beverage exercise I used with a recent client was deliberately designed to encourage premature certainty.

The fictional company had seen its traditional soft drinks grow more slowly than the market for two years. Locally inspired drinks were gaining visibility. 62% of younger consumers in an exploratory study said they wanted to try new flavours, while 57% of retailers reported customers asking for less sugar.

The new concept looked attractive on paper. Hibiscus, lime and mild ginger, with a distinctive baobab-flower aroma. Sugar was 20% lower than the company’s standard sodas. International competitors were mostly playing in familiar global flavours, so there appeared to be some open space.

At that point, most people can already feel the answer forming. Local tastes are gaining. Young consumers want novelty. People are asking for less sugar. Competitors have not claimed the territory. Launch it. Except none of those facts proves that conclusion.

Traditional sodas growing more slowly than the market tells us something has changed, but not why. Consumers saying they want new flavours tells us they are open to novelty in principle, not that they will buy this particular flavour combination twice. Retailers reporting requests for less sugar is interesting, but it does not tell us how often that request occurs, which consumers make it, whether it influences purchase, or what they are willing to sacrifice in taste to get it.

Anyone who has spent time in innovation knows how seductive “interest” can be. People love saying they would try something new. They also love saying they want healthier choices, more

The post Before You Fix the Problem, Make Sure You’ve Found It first appeared on c3centricity.

This Article Explains How CPG Alignment Often Hides Weak Commitment, Slow Decisions and Exhausted Mid-Level Managers. It also explains how to resolve the problem – invaluable!

Prefer to Listen?

Executive Summary

“Alignment” sounds like one of those harmless corporate words. Sensible. Mature. Collaborative. The sort of word people use when they want to show they have consulted the right functions, managed the politics and reduced the risk before a decision goes upstairs.

That’s exactly why it’s dangerous.

Inside CPG companies, alignment is often used to describe something much weaker than real commitment. It can mean everyone attended the meeting. It can mean nobody objected loudly enough to stop the project. It can mean the deck has been circulated, comments have been gathered, and all the right people can later prove they were involved. What it often does not mean is that the trade-off has been named, the decision owner is clear, the customer or consumer consequence has been understood, or the process has changed enough to deliver the promise.

This matters because CPG does not appear to have a collaboration shortage. Deloitte’s 2026 Consumer Products Industry Outlook found that 73% of CPG respondents and 56% of retail respondents cite goal misalignment as the top barrier to collaboration on joint business planning. Deloitte’s Retail-CPG Commercial Collaboration Benchmark Study also reported that 73% of companies increased collaboration over five years and 86% saw higher sales, yet many still remained stuck in incremental improvement rather than stronger shared value creation.

The same pattern shows up inside organisations. BCG reports that nearly 70% of CPG companies cite silos as the top barrier to omnichannel activation and holistic investment allocation. Gartner found that 84% of marketers experience high collaboration drag from cross-functional work, caused by too many meetings, too much feedback and unclear decision-making authority.

For mid-level managers, this is not a theoretical issue. They are often the people asked to “get everyone aligned” when what the business really needs is a decision about which priority wins. Marketing is protecting the brand idea. Sales is worried about the retailer. Finance is watching margin. Supply wants fewer exceptions. Legal is guarding risk. Insights is trying to keep the consumer evidence honest. Each function has a legitimate reason for its position, but the plan weakens when those tensions stay hidden behind polite agreement.

QC2™ is useful here because it tests whether alignment exists where it matters: across the company, the customer or consumer, the brand and the processes that make delivery possible. If those four areas are not connected, alignment becomes theatre. The meeting may feel smooth, but the customer, the retailer, the shelf or the service team will eventually find the gap.

Alignment is where too many good CPG ideas go to lose their edge.

Not all at once. That would be easier to spot. They lose it gradually, one reasonable comment at a time, until the original idea has been softened, resized, risk-managed and pre-approved into something nobody hates and nobody would defend with much energy.

That is the quiet damage.

A sharper claim becomes safer. A consumer-led innovation becomes operationally convenient. A customer experience improvement becomes a pilot with no teeth. A portfolio decision becomes a political compromise. A pricing move becomes a spreadsheet answer to a human trust problem. A brand idea that had some tension in it becomes “broadly acceptable,” which is often the most polite way of saying forgettable.

Nobody sets out to do this. That’s the uncomfortable part. The people in the room are usually competent, experienced and under pressure. They’re not trying to sabotage the work, they’re just doing what their functions reward them for doing:

• Sales protects the customer relationship because the buyer will be the one on the phone first.
• Finance protects margin because someone has to.
• Supply protects simplicity because every exception that looks manageable in PowerPoint becomes a real headache in production, forecasting and service.
• Legal protects the business from claims that could come back hard.
• Insights protects the consumer evidence from being stretched beyond what it can honestly support.
• Marketing protects the brand because if every function takes a slice out of the idea, there may be nothing left worth buying.

All legitimate. All necessary. And yet still, collectively, dangerous. Because when every function protects its own risk without anyone forcing the trade-off into the open, the final decision can become weaker than any one person intended. That is the part “alignment” often hides.

The meeting was (too) smooth. That may be the warning sign.

There is a particular kind of CPG meeting that looks successful from the outside. The pre-read went out on time. The right people were there. The discussion was polite. Nobody derailed the agenda. The project lead captured actions. The senior person at the end said, “Good, sounds like we’re aligned.”

Everyone leaves relieved, but that relief should make you suspicious.

Real alignment is rarely that neat when the decision matters. If the plan touches price, pack, claims, supply, retailer support, market execution, service response or brand trust, someone should feel the trade-off. Maybe more than one person. If nobody feels it, there is a fair chance the team has stayed at the level of broad intention rather than the actual choice.

It’s easy to agree that the brand needs to grow, but it’s much harder to agree whether growth should come from penetration, premiumisation, improved availability, range simplification, sharper claims, better retailer execution, more investment behind fewer SKUs, or fixing the repeat-purchase problem nobody wants to admit is serious.

It’s easy to agree that innovation needs to move faster., but it’s harder to decide whether the team will accept weaker evidence, higher supply risk, a less distinctive proposition, or a retailer conversation that may not go well.

It’s easy to agree that the company should become more customer-centric, but it’s harder to decide whose process has to change, whose budget has to move, whose metric has to be challenged, and whose pet project has to stop.

That’s where alignment

The post Do you know what the Most Dangerous Word in CPG Is? first appeared on c3centricity.

Why You Must Amplify Your Impact in 2026, because it matters more than it did five years ago.

Executive Summary

Ask any mid-level manager what got them noticed last year, and most will describe how hard they worked. That’s the tell.

For a long time, effort was the story that got people promoted. A packed diary showed a reputation for never dropping the ball. Under pressure, the person who everyone could rely on carried teams forward. Managers noticed the effort, and promotions followed.

That combination used to carry people up the ladder in CPG, aligning with Career strategy. Some teams attribute slower growth to inconsistent effort, while others credit steady reliability. In practice, this approach shapes how leaders assess readiness for bigger roles.

Reliability read as proof of value, or close enough that nobody looked too hard. Over time, teams learned to value consistency over flashy results. That mindset became part of how teams plan growth. The emphasis on consistency shaped leadership decisions for years.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries and found the gap opening up. 53% of leaders say productivity has to go up, while 80% of the workforce says it doesn’t have the time or energy to make that happen. The same report clocked something else: employees get interrupted by a meeting, an email, or a chat every two minutes during the workday.

Effort, in other words, isn’t proof of anything. Not anymore. In fact I don’t think it has been for many years.

Prefer to listen rather than read?

The Excuse is Now Running Out

Mid-level managers in CPG could once point to their full agenda as evidence of their value. Retailer meeting at 9, an innovation review at 10, a claims discussion before lunch, a global deck rewrite by evening. Everyone was doing something. Nobody had time to ask whether their particular something actually mattered.

AI is now slowly closing that excuse down, one task at a time. It drafts the first version of a retailer update. It summarizes consumer reviews. And it turns a two-hour Teams / Zoom call into a one-page action list.

Deloitte’s 2026 Consumer Products Industry Outlook put it painfully clearly. Product managers could adopt a Career strategy that makes them entrepreneurial, consumer-obsessed creators. That work has consumed their days for the last ten to twenty years. Once AI takes the technocratic marketing work off their plate, it frees days.

That’s the opportunity for your Career strategy.

But it’s also the threat.

If AI removes the coordination work that made you look busy, what’s left to prove?

Are you still valuable to the company otherwise?

Nobody is going to reward you for drafting the retailer update faster.

They’re going to notice what you do with the hour that drafting used to take.

Meetings are where fake impact hides best

A meeting that changes a decision is worth having. A meeting that exists because nobody has made the decision clear enough is a different animal entirely, and CPG calendars are full of the second kind.

Shopify found this out the hard way, then did something about it. At the start of 2023, the company canceled 12,000 recurring meetings involving three or more people and brought back “no-meeting Wednesdays.” By its own count, that freed up 322,000 hours across the year. Average meeting time per person dropped 14% in the first five months compared with the year before; on Wednesdays specifically, it dropped 26%. Most of those 12,000 meetings were never rebuilt. Nobody had missed them.

Shopify isn’t a CPG company, and the lesson isn’t “delete your calendar.” The lesson is that time has a cost most organizations never make visible. CPG teams know exactly what a late shipment costs, or a packaging change, or a retailer penalty. They rarely know what eight people spending three weeks circling an undecided issue costs. That’s where impact quietly leaks away.

When busy gets mistaken for value

CPG has its own version of this mistake, and it cost billions to learn.

When Kraft and Heinz merged in 2015, the new leadership rolled out zero-based budgeting across the business: every dollar had to be justified from zero, not carried forward from last year’s plan. On paper, it moved fast. Overhead dropped from roughly 18% to 11% within about fifteen months. Meetings were full of cost discussion. Spreadsheets multiplied. Everyone could point to a number moving the right way.

By February 2019, the company took a $15.4 billion write-down on its Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands. The stock fell 27% in a single day. The cost-cutting had been real and measurable. What it left behind wasn’t: under-invested brands, strained supplier relationships, and a business that had gotten leaner without getting stronger.

Nobody at Kraft Heinz was accused of being lazy. The opposite. The organization was busy proving efficiency, meeting by meeting, spreadsheet by spreadsheet, while the harder judgment call, how much a brand actually needed to stay competitive, went unmade. Activity had a number attached to it. Impact didn’t, until it showed up as a $15 billion write-down.

What Amplify Your Impact actually means

It doesn’t mean self-promotion, and that distinction matters, because plenty of strong managers recoil from anything that smells like personal marketing.

It means the value you create travels further than the hours you put into creating it. A decision gets sharper because you clarified the real issue. A junior colleague grows because you handed over judgment instead of quietly redoing their work. A senior leader trusts your recommendation because you connected the consumer, the retailer, and the business consequence in one clear line.

Impact isn’t volume. It’s the gap between what would have happened without you and what happened because you were there.

This is why Amplify Your Impact sits inside LADDERS as its own rung, not a footnote under the others. Mid-level CPG managers are often the most valuable people in the building and the least visible. They’re over-used because they’re reliable, under-seen because reliability doesn’t announce itself,

The post Busy Isn’t a Career Strategy—Essential Next Steps first appeared on c3centricity.

Why deep customer understanding is the growth edge CPG teams cannot afford to outsource to data and algorithms

Executive Summary

The most dangerous moment in any CPG strategy meeting is not when someone challenges the data.

What matters is deep customer understanding when no one raises questions.

AI and analytics give CPG teams more information than any prior generation of managers.

The post The Hidden Risk: How AI Makes Mistakes Seem Right first appeared on c3centricity.

Cautious consumers are still spending, but every product now has to earn permission to enter the basket.

Prefer to Listen?

Executive Summary

Value has changed.

That sounds simple, but many CPG teams are still responding as though value means price, discount, pack size, or promotion. Those tools still matter, but they no longer explain the full consumer decision.

McKinsey’s 2026 State of the Consumer says the priority consumers place on value now cuts across income segments and categories. It describes the rise of the “resourceful consumer,” shaped by cost pressure, technology, health priorities, and a more fragmented path to purchase.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Consumer Products Industry Outlook says 47% of consumers globally, including 35% of high-income households, are now “value seekers.” These consumers regularly make cost-conscious choices, convenience sacrifices, and deal-driven decisions to keep spending under control. Deloitte also notes that growth favours brands that feel worth it across price tiers, but only about one-third of brands currently achieve that status.

NIQ’s 2026 Consumer Outlook adds a crucial trust dimension. It reports that 95% of consumers say trusting the brand they are buying from is very or somewhat important, and that consumers are spending intentionally, rewarding brands that deliver trust and value.

The message for mid-level CPG managers is clear. Consumers are not simply buying the cheapest option. They are asking a harder question: “Can I justify buying this?”

That is the permission-to-buy test. Brands that pass it can protect relevance, margin and growth. Brands that fail it may discover that consumers did not leave because the price was too high. They left because the brand no longer felt worth it.

Why value is no longer the same as low price

Many CPG teams still treat value as a pricing problem. That is understandable. Price is visible. Promotions are measurable. Pack architecture can be adjusted. Retailers want proof. Finance wants margin. Sales wants a simple story.

The problem is that consumers do not experience value as a spreadsheet.

They experience value as a judgement. Does this product deserve my money, my space, my attention, my trust, my time, and my repeat purchase?

That judgement has become more deliberate because consumers are under pressure. They are managing higher everyday costs, more product choice, more information, more health concerns, more sustainability expectations, and more uncertainty about what deserves priority.

McKinsey says consumers’ path to purchase is becoming more complicated, brand influence is more diffuse, and brands must consistently earn the right to be chosen by proving value across a more fragmented decision landscape.

That phrase “earn the right to be chosen” should make every CPG manager pause. It means value is not a static price-positioning decision. It is a live consumer judgement that can change by category, occasion, mood, household pressure, channel, claim, pack and usage moment.

A mother buying baby food, a pet owner buying a trusted brand, a commuter choosing coffee, and a premium beauty shopper deciding whether to repurchase are not applying the same value equation. They may all be value-seeking consumers, but they are not all seeking the same value.

The better question is not “Are we cheap enough?” It is “What does the consumer need this product to prove before they feel comfortable choosing it?”

The permission-to-buy test

The permission-to-buy test is the moment when the consumer decides whether a product deserves a place in the basket.

It does not always happen consciously. A shopper may not say, “I am now assessing perceived value.” They simply hesitate. They compare. They check the label. They look at the unit price. They remember whether the product disappointed last time. They think about waste. They wonder whether the private label is good enough. They decide whether the premium is justified.

That hesitation is where growth is won or lost.

A product can pass the permission-to-buy test in many ways. It may save time. It may reduce risk. It may feel healthier. It may taste better. It may perform more reliably. It may be easier to use. It may reassure a parent. It may make a small moment feel more enjoyable. It may reduce waste. It may help the shopper feel they made a responsible choice.

Price is part of that test, but it is not the whole test.

NIQ’s 2026 Consumer Outlook says consumers are spending intentionally and rewarding brands that deliver trust and value. It also reports that clean label products in the US are growing faster than the overall US FMCG average, showing that transparency and simplicity can support loyalty.

That matters because it shows how value stretches beyond affordability. A product with a clean label may not be the cheapest option. It can still feel worth it because it answers a different consumer need: confidence.

A practical question for a category review is this: what permission does the shopper need before they buy us again at full price?

Some categories require permission to trust. Others require permission to indulge. Others require permission to pay more. Others require permission to switch. Others require permission to simplify. Each one points to a different growth strategy.

Value-seeking consumers are not only low-income consumers

One of the most useful findings from Deloitte’s 2026 outlook is that value-seeking behaviour cuts across income groups. Deloitte reports that 47% of consumers globally are value seekers, including 35% of high-income households.

That destroys a lazy assumption. Value-seeking consumers are not simply consumers with less money. They are consumers who are more deliberate about how they spend.

A high-income shopper can still resent waste. A premium buyer can still reject a weak claim. A busy household can still choose private label if the national brand no longer justifies the difference. A younger consumer can still splurge, but only when the emotional return feels strong enough.

This is why CPG teams need to separate affordability from justification.

Affordability asks, “Can they pay?”

Justification asks, “Do they believe it is worth paying?”

Those are different questions. Many brands focus on the first and underinvest in the second.

The post Value-Seeking Consumers Are Changing CPG Growth: Why Price Is Not Enough first appeared on c3centricity.

Executive Summary

Supply chain volatility used to be treated as a back-office issue. That’s no longer enough!

When consumers can’t find the product they expect, when pack sizes change without explanation, or when retailers lose confidence in service levels, the problem becomes visible. And once it becomes visible, it becomes a brand trust issue.

KPMG says tariffs, protectionism and trade disruption are likely to keep recurring in 2026 and beyond, with new duties able to change landed costs overnight.

Deloitte reports that 69% of surveyed consumer products executives are shortening supply chains to reduce risk.

NIQ’s 2026 Consumer Outlook shows that 95% of consumers say trusting the brand they buy from is important.

Mid-level CPG managers may not own sourcing, factories or logistics. But they often own the promise that shoppers and retailers experience. That makes availability a commercial, brand and career issue.

If you prefer to listen:

A consumer doesn’t see your supply chain problem. They see an empty space on the shelf where their product should be, or maybe a substitute they didn’t ask for, or a retailer sign or website saying “currently unavailable.”

Then they make a judgement.

Not about your procurement challenge. Not about your freight issue. Not even about the tariff impact your team has been debating for six weeks.

They make a judgement about your brand!

That judgement may be unfair. It may ignore all the operational pressure you’re facing that is sitting behind the problem. But it’s still the judgement that matters commercially.

For years, CPG companies treated supply chain resilience as an operations topic. That made sense when disruptions were occasional and mostly invisible to consumers.

But today, volatility has moved closer to the shopper. It affects availability, price, pack, claims, launch timing, retailer confidence and service response.

That changes the role of mid-level managers.

Marketing doesn’t own the factory. Sales doesn’t own the shipping route. Insights don’t own supplier risk. Innovation doesn’t own raw-material planning. Yet all these teams often own the explanations, expectations and decisions that determine whether disruption becomes a temporary irritation or a lasting trust gap among consumers.

Make no mistake, the availability promise is now an integral part of the brand promise.

Why availability now carries more emotional weight

Availability used to feel basic. The product was either there or it wasn’t.

Today it’s more emotionally loaded because shoppers are already under pressure, managing higher prices, tighter budgets, more choices, more health concerns and more information. They’re also making more deliberate decisions about what deserves a place in their basket.

NIQ’s Consumer Outlook Guide to 2026 says consumers have become cautious, with every purchase needing to earn its place. NIQ also reports that 95% of consumers say trusting the brand they are buying from is very or somewhat important, while functional quality and consistency are key trust drivers.

That last word matters: consistency.

A brand that is usually there feels dependable. A brand that disappears without explanation feels fragile. A brand that changes size, quality or availability without preparing the consumer, feels as though it has broken an unwritten agreement. This is why out-of-stocks do more damage than the single missed sale. They create a moment of forced reconsideration. The consumer who came to buy your brand now has to think: do I wait, try the retailer brand, buy a smaller size, switch format, choose another store, or decide I don’t need it after all?

For CPG managers, this makes availability part of consumer behaviour, not just supply planning.

The operational issue becomes a consumer story

Supply disruption is rarely simple.

A product may be unavailable for many different reasons: supplier fragility, raw material cost, freight delays, production changes, retailer ordering behaviour, forecasting errors, promotional spikes, or packaging constraints, tariff exposure or internal prioritisation.

Consumers rarely see that complexity.

Retailers may see more of it, but they still judge the commercial effect rather than the impact on consumers.

Did the brand protect shelf presence? Did it warn early? Did it offer a credible alternative? Did it help the buyer manage the category impact? Did it arrive with a plan?

KPMG’s 2026 supply chain outlook says ongoing tariffs, non-tariff protectionism and trade disruption are likely to keep recurring, with new duties able to change landed costs overnight and force teams to reconsider sourcing, shipping routes and customer prices.

Deloitte’s 2026 Consumer Products Industry Global Outlook adds that 69% of surveyed consumer products executives said they are shortening supply chains to reduce risk.

These are major strategic moves.

Yet the consumer-facing effect may look mundane: fewer variants, a changed pack, a gap on shelf, a postponed promotion, a smaller assortment or a price increase. The gap between internal complexity and external simplicity is where trust can break.

A mid-level brand manager may not be able to fix the landed cost, but they can ask whether the consumer story has been prepared.

A sales manager may not be able to change the production plan, but they can ask whether the retailer has been given a credible category answer.

An insights manager may not be able to prevent the disruption, but they can show which consumers are most likely to switch and which messages reduce frustration rather than adding noise.

An innovation manager may not be able to prevent a delayed launch, but they can help the organisation decide whether it is better to launch late with confidence or launch weakly into inconsistent availability.

Availability is no longer just “Can we make it?” It is also “Can we protect trust while we manage the constraint?”

Why silence makes disruption worse

Many CPG teams communicate late because they are waiting for certainty.

That instinct is understandable. Nobody wants to tell a retailer or consumer something that later changes. Nobody wants to create concern when the supply chain team is still working through options. The problem with that is that silence creates its own story.

When a product disappears, consumers do not wait for an official explanation before forming an opinion. They

The post How to Protect Consumers’ CPG Brand Trust when Shelves are Empty first appeared on c3centricity.

What mid-level CPG managers need to know when PFAS, microplastics and ingredient transparency questions threaten the brands they manage.

Executive Summary

Something has shifted in the relationship between consumers and the products they buy every day. Product ingredient safety has moved from a technical subject to a trust subject. Consumers are reading, searching, scanning, comparing and switching. They are no longer waiting for brands to reassure them after a concern appears. Many are already acting before the brand has even recognised the issue.

YouGov research published in May 2026 found that 78% of Americans are concerned about the safety of ingredients in products such as food, cosmetics and personal care items. Half say they are more concerned than they were a year earlier, 57% say they have avoided certain products or brands, and 61% say manufacturers should provide greater transparency about ingredients and sourcing.

This is not only a US issue. YouGov UK found that 61% of Britons are concerned about ingredient safety in everyday consumer products, 44% have avoided certain products or brands, and 56% say manufacturers should provide greater transparency about ingredients and sourcing.

Prefer to Listen?

Regulation is moving too

France has introduced PFAS restrictions affecting categories such as cosmetics, textiles and ski waxes from 2026. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applies from 12 August 2026 and sets PFAS limits for food-contact packaging, with European Commission guidance stating there is no transitional period for exhausting stocks placed on the market after that date.

Mid-level CPG managers do not usually own the chemistry, the packaging specification or the procurement process. Yet they often own the consumer story, the retailer conversation, the claims language and the launch narrative. That’s why this matters.

Reformulation may be necessary, but reformulation alone does not rebuild consumer confidence. Trust has to be rebuilt deliberately, with transparency, proof and human understanding.

Product ingredient safety has become a mainstream consumer concern

The YouGov data is striking because it shows concern turning into behaviour. More than half of Americans say they have searched online for product ingredients or safety, and the same proportion say they have read and researched ingredient labels. That means consumers are not just worried. They are investigating.

The same pattern appears in shopping behaviour. Acosta Group’s 2026 shopper research found that 58% of all shoppers read labels all or most of the time before buying a new item. Among health-focused shoppers, that figure rises to 87%.

The narrative inside the consumer’s mind is simple: “I need to check before I trust.”

That’s a major shift for CPG. Familiarity used to do much of the work. A trusted brand, a known pack, and a familiar claim were often enough to lower perceived risk. Today, consumers have more tools, more content, more anxiety and more ability to challenge what a brand says.

Ingredient apps, online reviews, social media explainers and independent commentators have changed the balance of power. A consumer can scan a barcode, search an ingredient and read a claim challenge while standing in the aisle. That does not mean they always interpret the science accurately. It does mean the brand no longer controls the first explanation.

A useful question for every CPG team is this: what will a concerned consumer find in the first five minutes if they search our ingredients, our packaging, and our claims?

If the answer is unclear, incomplete or defensive, the trust gap is already open.

The regulatory clock is moving faster than brand planning

Regulatory timelines rarely fit neatly into annual brand plans. That is why product ingredient safety now creates pressure for marketing, sales, insights, innovation and category teams, not only legal and regulatory affairs.

France’s PFAS law, adopted in 2025, restricts PFAS in consumer products including cosmetics, textiles and ski waxes from 2026, with broader textile restrictions following later.

The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation entered into force in February 2025 and generally applies from 12 August 2026. European Commission guidance states that from 12 August 2026, food-contact packaging must not be placed on the market if it contains PFAS at or above defined limits. The guidance also states that the PPWR does not provide a transitional period for exhausting stocks produced before that date if they are placed on the market after 12 August 2026. Packaging placed on the market before that date may remain on the market and does not need to be withdrawn.

PFHxA restrictions under REACH add another layer. SGS reports that restrictions apply from April 2026 for categories such as cosmetics and food-contact paper and cardboard, with further restrictions from October 2026 for goods such as footwear, clothing-related textiles and certain mixtures.

The United States is more fragmented, but the direction is similar. The EPA’s draft Sixth Contaminant Candidate List includes microplastics and PFAS among contaminant groups under review, with comments due by 5 June 2026.

The practical problem is not only compliance. The practical problem is timing. A packaging refresh, range extension, claim update or retailer sell-in may already be underway when a regulatory deadline, class action, NGO report or social media conversation changes the context. A brand that waits until compliance is finished before preparing the consumer story is likely to be late.

The right question is not “Are we legally compliant?” That question is necessary, but not enough. The sharper question is “Will consumers and retailers understand why they should still trust us?”

Marketing and sales are exposed, even when they do not own the chemistry

R&D may own formulation. Procurement may own suppliers. Packaging teams may own material choices. Legal may own compliance. Yet marketing and sales own the moments where trust becomes visible.

They own the pack claims. They own retailer sell-in. They own launch decks. They own category buyer conversations. They own social response language. They often own the first explanation when a consumer asks why an ingredient is used or whether a product is safe.

This is where the organisational dilemma begins. The facts may sit in one

The post Product Ingredient Safety Is Now a Trust Test for CPG Brands first appeared on c3centricity.

Remember the Buy Local Trend? It’s back! Supply chain shocks amplify it, and global brands must earn local trust again.

Executive summary

Consumers prefer local when uncertainty rises, because familiar choices feel safer and more accountable. Reuters analysis published May 18, 2026 estimates the current U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has already cost global companies at least $25 billion, with disruption linked to trade routes, energy prices, and input costs.

A second-order effect shows up quietly, then suddenly. Consumers tighten their trust circle and lean toward what feels closer, more accountable, and less risky.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer frames this as a “trust amid insularity” dynamic, and one of its top findings is striking: 34% of the general population would accept higher prices and fewer choices to limit foreign companies operating in their country.

That mindset shift has consequences for global brands. McKinsey’s State of the Consumer report notes that 42% of European survey respondents said they had a worse or somewhat worse perception of American brands in May 2025 compared with the beginning of the year. The specific example is American brands, but the mechanism is broader: country cues can quickly leak into brand sentiment.

This post explains why the country of origin effect and buy local trend strengthen after shocks, what it means for global brand trust in the US, UK, and beyond, and what mid-level CPG managers can do now to keep momentum without pretending their brand is something it isn’t.

Prefer to Listen:

Supply chain shocks: why boardrooms fear knock-on effects

Reuters describes the Iran conflict’s corporate cost as more than a headline, highlighting disruptions tied to shipping routes, oil prices, petrochemicals and other inputs, with at least $25 billion in impact across companies so far.

That is the measurable side. The lived side inside CPG is the chain reaction that follows. Cost pressure triggers pricing discussions. Pricing discussions trigger retailer conversations. Retailer conversations trigger promotion debates and supply prioritisation. Those debates often slow decisions because nobody wants to be the person who “overreacted” and got it wrong.

Shoppers do not see those internal negotiations. They experience the output as shelf gaps, substitutions, smaller packs, inconsistent availability, and price movement. That experience changes what “trust” feels like in the aisle. Trust becomes less about brand love and more about confidence that you will get what you expect.

A practical question belongs early in every category meeting during volatility: what does “safe” mean to the shopper right now. Plenty of teams assume “safe” means cheaper. Many shoppers interpret “safe” as predictable, familiar, and unlikely to disappoint. That difference is where margin and loyalty quietly move.

CPG resilience becomes commercially meaningful when consumers can feel it as stability, not just read it in a corporate report.

Consumers prefer local when risk rises

YouGov’s cross-market polling from 2023 found that consumers vary by country, yet the preference for domestic purchase shows up strongly in several markets, with 54% in Great Britain saying they’re more likely to buy from a British company.

That is not a perfect “global number,” and it’s useful precisely because it shows nuance. The UK is often less protectionist than people expect, yet even there a majority still leans domestic. Consumer localism is not a uniform ideology. It’s a response to perceived risk, identity, and accountability.

McKinsey adds another layer that matters for your audience. Their April–May 2025 survey across the US, UK, Germany and China asked why consumers prefer domestic brands. McKinsey reports 36% say they want to support domestic businesses and 20% say local brands better fit their needs. Only 13% say domestic brands are more affordable. That’s a big clue. Local preference is often about fit and familiarity, not price.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer supports the broader “trust circle narrows” narrative, describing insularity as a defining feature of current trust dynamics.

That is the data. The real-world behaviour looks like this: shoppers simplify. They avoid regret. They choose what feels dependable. “Local” becomes a shortcut for that dependability, even when the local product is not objectively more reliable.

A useful decision question for brand teams: which parts of our proposition rely on being “global,” and which parts must feel “close” and culturally fluent to be trusted. Global brand trust now depends on answering the second part clearly.

Country of origin effect: why sentiment shifts faster than product reality

McKinsey’s State of the Consumer report says 42% of European respondents had a worse or somewhat worse perception of American brands in May 2025 than at the beginning of the year.

This is the country of origin effect in motion. Consumers are not sitting down to do a rational assessment of brand ownership or manufacturing location. They are absorbing cues from headlines, social media, public conversations, and then those cues leak into preference, willingness to pay, and switching behaviour.

The uncomfortable part for global companies is that the product does not need to change for perception to shift. Sentiment can drift even when quality is stable. When sentiment drifts, retailers become more receptive to local challengers and private brands, and consumers become more price-sensitive toward the brands they feel less emotionally connected to.

A practical question that helps mid-level managers spot this early: what would a consumer assume about us if they only saw our brand name and origin cues, with no other context. That question sounds simple, but it forces you to look at your packaging cues, retailer content, and brand story through a lens that is suddenly more active.

The most useful comment here is not “country of origin effect is bad.” The useful comment is that it is often invisible until it shows up in share and margin, so it needs to be managed like any other commercial risk.

Why global brand trust is slipping

Edelman’s Top 10 findings include that 34% of the general population would accept higher prices and fewer choices to limit foreign companies operating in their country.

That is a remarkable willingness to trade convenience

The post Consumers Prefer Local After Shocks: Why Global Brand Trust Is Declining first appeared on c3centricity.

Close the AI skills gap, ensure human oversight, and keep every decision defensible — without turning your workweek into compliance theatre

Executive Summary

AI literacy is now a job requirement for CPG teams. Decks get drafted faster. Analysis gets summarised faster. Concept iterations move faster. The uncomfortable part is not speed — it is accountability.

Most organisations cannot answer four basic questions with confidence. What AI use is permitted? What outputs must be checked? What needs to be stored? Who signs off when AI-assisted work influences a real decision?

Regulation has turned AI literacy into a legal obligation. The European Commission states that Article 4 entered into application on 2 February 2025. The obligation to ensure AI literacy of staff already applies, with enforcement rules following from 3 August 2026.

The AI skills gap is real and growing. DataCamp’s 2026 State of Data and AI Literacy Report found that 82% of enterprise leaders say their organisation provides AI training — yet 59% still report an AI skills gap. Training is not the problem. Operating habits are.

Governance has not kept pace either. A joint Thomson Reuters Foundation and UNESCO release from March 2026 reported that only 12% of companies have a policy ensuring human oversight of AI systems.

This post is for mid-level CPG leaders who want momentum without becoming personally accountable for a confident AI output that turns out to be wrong, risky, or impossible to defend. The six habits below fit a real workweek. They are not compliance theatre.

AI Literacy Has Moved From Training to Duty of Care — and the Skills Gap Is Showing

Many mid-level managers hear AI literacy and picture an online course. That mental model is outdated. The Commission’s Q&A makes clear that the obligation is already in force, with enforcement supervision beginning in August 2026.

In practice, AI literacy means operational readiness. A team with genuine AI literacy can explain what AI was used for on a given output. They can explain what it was not used for. They understand what could go wrong, and what checks were applied before that output influenced a decision.

However, the DataCamp data reveals a striking paradox. Most enterprises offer AI training, yet most still have an AI skills gap. The gap is not about access to tools — it is about applied workforce fluency. That fluency is built through habits, not courses.

As a result, the test worth applying before any team gets attached to a polished AI draft is direct: could you defend how you reached this conclusion to a retailer, a regulator, or a consumer? That question is not philosophical. It is a practical filter that catches problems before they travel upstream.

BYOAI Risk Is Why Most Policies Feel Irrelevant

Microsoft and LinkedIn’s 2024 Work Trend Index reported that 75% of global knowledge workers now use AI at work. Furthermore, 78% of those users bring their own tools, bypassing anything their organisation has sanctioned. This dynamic — widely known as BYOAI — is the single biggest driver of unmanaged AI risk in corporate teams today.

BYOAI risk compounds quickly in CPG environments. One manager pastes sensitive consumer research into the wrong tool because nobody said not to. Another publishes an AI-assisted competitor claim because it sounds plausible. A third uses AI to draft consumer-facing language, and nobody verifies the claims embedded in the phrasing.

Tools spread at the speed of curiosity. However, governance spreads at the speed of legal review. The gap between those two speeds is where BYOAI risk lives, invisibly, until something goes wrong.

The dilemma for mid-level leaders is real. Saying no to AI looks slow and backward. Saying yes without guardrails leaves you exposed. The better stance is straightforward: AI is allowed, but decision-grade work must be defensible. That framing protects momentum because it removes the fear-driven review cycle that kills speed more effectively than any guardrail does.

Governance Is Lagging, AI Accountability Is Unclear, and Mid-Level Leaders Are Exposed

Only 12% of companies have a policy ensuring human oversight of AI systems, according to the UNESCO and Thomson Reuters Foundation 2026 release.

That is the AI accountability gap in numbers — and it lands squarely on the people producing the work.

The AI Company Data Initiative’s Corporate AI Governance Report 2025 reinforces the picture. Nearly 90% of companies have not committed to any named AI governance framework. Moreover, only 13% have a policy to ensure human oversight of AI systems. In addition, only 2.3% have a dedicated complaints mechanism for AI-related issues.

That governance vacuum creates a predictable pattern. AI outputs get trusted when they should be questioned. Conversely, they get questioned when they should be trusted. Teams either move too fast and make avoidable mistakes, or they slow to a crawl because nobody feels safe making a call.

Consequently, the real question for any mid-level leader is practical: what habits make AI output trustworthy enough to influence decisions in this team, in this category, in this company? That is what AI literacy actually means at your level — and why closing the AI skills gap starts with operating habits, not training modules.

The Career Signal Is Already Shifting

A Reuters report from 27 April 2026 described Accenture rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to all 743,000 employees — the largest enterprise Copilot deal on record. More significantly, Accenture plans to tie leadership promotions to AI usage.

That is not a small detail. AI is moving from tool choice to performance expectation in the organisations where it is most embedded. Avoiding AI entirely makes your work look slower and less relevant. However, using AI without discipline makes your work look risky and hard to approve.

The winning position is responsible speed: AI-assisted work that is easy to trust and straightforward to sign off. That is what the six habits below are designed to deliver.

Two CPG Examples That Show What Responsible AI Looks Like

Unilever published results in September 2025 showing AI-assisted content creation running up to 30% faster

The post 6 Proven AI Literacy Habits That Protect CPG Leaders in 2026 first appeared on c3centricity.

The post Promotional Effectiveness Reset for CPG first appeared on c3centricity.