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Costs rising faster than price
Input and operating costs keep climbing while pricing power thins. The gap has to be closed with mix, pack architecture, and smarter promotion — not blanket increases.
Revenue Growth Management · Consumer Packaged Goods
Turn cost pressure into
margin and revenue growth.
Input costs are up, shoppers are trading down, and yesterday's pricing and promotion playbooks are quietly leaking margin. GrowthEngine rebuilds your RGM engine — pricing, pack architecture, mix, and trade promotion — from the ground up, with AI at the core rather than bolted on the side.
0%of CPG revenue flows through trade promotion
0%of Australian grocery products are sold on promotion
0–7 ptsprofit-margin edge for strong RGM operators
Built for the realities facing modern consumer goods leaders
The macro picture
The squeeze is structural, not seasonal.
Sustained input-cost inflation, volatile commodities, and a value-seeking shopper have compressed CPG margins from both ends. List-price increases are losing their headroom, private label is winning share, and retailers are demanding more for less. The growth that used to come from "take a price increase" now has to be engineered — surgically, by pack, channel, and occasion.
The hard truth: most RGM functions were built for a low-inflation, spreadsheet-driven world — 43% of CPGs still run pack-price architecture in Excel. They react slowly and treat pricing, promotion, and mix as separate workstreams. In today's market, that costs you points of margin every cycle. RGM mentions in top-100 CPG earnings calls have doubled, and two-thirds of profitable growers have already invested in RGM systems.
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Promotion leaking margin
Roughly a fifth of revenue flows through trade promotion, and a large share of those events return less than they cost. It's the single biggest pool of recoverable margin in the P&L.
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Siloed, slow workstreams
Pricing, promo, mix and assortment decisions are made in disconnected tools on quarterly cycles. The market moves weekly. The operating model has to change.
The five levers
Every point of margin lives in one of these five levers.
We pressure-test all five — and rebuild the one with the most trapped value first. For most CPGs, that's trade promotion.
Trade Promotion Management & Optimisation
Trade spend is often the second-largest line on the P&L and the least governed. Australia is one of the most heavily promoted grocery markets in the world, yet an estimated A$11.3bn in promotional discounting each year generates little to no incremental sales. We bring AI-driven promo optimisation, post-event ROI measurement, and guardrails that kill value-destroying events and scale the winners — typically lifting trade ROI by 10–15% and turning trade from a cost centre into a growth lever.
- Event-level ROI & baseline modelling
- Predictive promo optimisation
- Trade spend governance & guardrails
Pricing & Elasticity
AI-modelled price elasticity by SKU, channel, and occasion — so increases land where demand can bear them and hold where it can't.
Price-Pack Architecture
Engineer the right sizes at the right price points across channels to defend value perception and unlock entry and premium tiers.
Mix Management
Shift volume toward higher-margin SKUs, packs, and channels with decision science that sees the whole portfolio at once.
Assortment
Right-range the shelf: cut the tail, protect hero SKUs, and win the categories that drive trips and baskets.
Our thesis
AI doesn't optimise the old RGM.
It replaces it.
Most "AI for RGM" today is a model bolted onto a process designed for a spreadsheet era. It speeds up a broken workflow. The real prize comes from redesigning the workstream around what AI makes possible: continuous, granular, connected decisions.
We rebuild RGM as an always-on decision engine — where elasticity, promotion, mix, and pack decisions are made together, weekly, at SKU-store granularity, with humans setting strategy and guardrails while the system does the heavy analytical lifting. McKinsey puts the global generative-AI prize for CPG at US$160–270B in annual profit; the operators capturing it are redesigning the workstream, not bolting AI onto the old one.
Legacy RGM
- Quarterly, reactive cycles
- Siloed pricing / promo / mix
- Spreadsheets & gut feel
- Aggregate, lagging data
- Promo ROI measured after the fact, if at all
AI-Native RGM
- Continuous, proactive decisions
- One connected decision engine
- Decision science with human guardrails
- SKU-store granular, predictive
- Promo optimised before commitment
How we engage
From diagnostic to durable engine — in 90 days.
Diagnose
A rapid, data-driven RGM diagnostic across all five levers. We quantify the trapped margin and rank it by speed-to-value.
Prioritise
We build the business case and pick the first workstream to rebuild — usually trade promotion — with a clear ROI target.
Re-engineer
We redesign the workstream AI-native: models, data, governance, and the operating rhythm that makes it stick.
Scale
Prove value, then roll the engine across levers and markets — with your teams owning it, not dependent on us.
Who we are
Operator-led. AI-native. Built for CPG.
GrowthEngine is a specialist Revenue Growth Management consultancy for consumer packaged goods. We combine deep commercial RGM expertise with modern AI and decision science — and we build engines your teams own, not dependencies on us.
We work shoulder-to-shoulder with commercial, finance, and revenue teams to turn the theory of "AI-driven RGM" into governed, measurable margin in the P&L. No 200-slide decks that gather dust — working systems and a clear scoreboard.
— Sam Ford, Founder
Ready to find your trapped margin?
Book a 45-minute strategy call. We'll walk your RGM picture, pinpoint the biggest recoverable margin pool, and show you what an AI-native rebuild looks like for your business.
Book Your Strategy Call
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