There are three things that matter in today’s consumer packaged goods market: speed, precision, and data-driven insights.
Moving faster than competitors. Resurfacing trends in time to capture new market opportunities. Refining sales and marketing strategies on the fly. For this, many CPG leaders are turning to modern analytics tools that orchestrate and surface key business information when and where it’s needed most.
If you’re working to drive that kind of agility and impact across your organization, this article will help you learn how modern CPG analytics makes it possible.
What is CPG data analytics?
CPG data analytics is the process of collecting, connecting, and analyzing data from across your business and the market to inform decisions and drive growth.
It brings together information from your internal systems and external sources, such as sales data, consumer trends, marketing performance, and supply chain metrics. With modern tools, these insights are no longer buried in dashboards or spreadsheets—they’re surfaced when and where your teams need them, so you can stay ahead of the market.
How can CPG analytics improve efficiency?
Now that we’ve defined what CPG analytics is, the next question is: how does it make your business more efficient? Let’s have a look at a few advantages.
- Faster access to actionable insights: Need to know which SKUs are underperforming in the Northeast? Or how a recent promotion impacted sell-through at a key retailer? CPG analytics delivers those insights on demand without you needing ad hoc reports or digging through spreadsheets.
- Eliminate redundant work: Without a connected system, it’s common for insights and marketing teams to rerun the same analyses, often because prior findings are buried in email threads or siloed drives. For example, one brand team might spend weeks analyzing shelf velocity for a key retailer, unaware that the sales team ran a similar analysis six weeks earlier. A modern CPG analytics platform centralizes this knowledge, so teams can quickly find and reuse existing insights instead of duplicating effort.
- Reduce subject matter expert (SME) bottlenecks: Many insights are locked in the heads of subject matter experts. CPG analytics platforms make that knowledge discoverable, surfacing key findings from past campaigns, pricing studies, and sales reports. Teams can answer routine questions themselves, freeing SMEs to focus on more strategic work.
- Optimize product and promo spend: Are your dollars working as hard as they could be? Analytics helps you see which products, channels, and promotions drive the strongest ROI to help you invest where it matters most and cut what isn’t delivering.
- Accelerate time-to-market: The faster you can turn insights into action, the faster you can seize opportunities. With connected CPG analytics, you can speed up product development, refine go-to-market strategies, and respond to emerging trends ahead of your competitors.
Modern CPG analytics use cases powered by AI
AI in CPG is enabling a wide range of modern analytics use cases across the business. Here are some of the most common ways you can put advanced analytics to work today 👇
Federated insight search
Salesforce data reveals that 92% of CPG leaders lean into data to drive profitable growth. That’s obviously a good sign. The problem arises when much of it remains scattered across SharePoints, vendor platforms, third-party subscriptions, and internal drives, making it difficult to use when decisions need to happen fast.
AI-powered federated search solves this by indexing data where it lives. With one query, insights teams can instantly surface answers from internal reports, syndicated research, and vendor content without needing to upload files or create new workflows.
PepsiCo’s Ask Ada (powered by Capacity Answer Engine®) is a prime example. Analysts use it to search across hundreds of internal and external sources in seconds. Instead of weeks of manual digging, they get instant answers to complex questions—whether it’s understanding Gen Z flavor trends in Latin America or pulling historical pricing data for sparkling beverages in the Northeast.
Thanks to Capacity, PepsiCo was able to:
- Save over 5,000 hours per year by eliminating time spent manually searching across fragmented internal and third-party data sources
- Accelerate adoption across the organization, achieving 2500% growth in monthly users, with teams now relying on the tool for daily insights
- Democratize global knowledge so insights and marketing teams worldwide can learn from each other’s wins and challenges, improving collaboration and decision-making across markets.
Regional trend analysis
Once you can surface insights quickly, the next challenge is how to apply them where they matter most—at the regional level.
As you know, consumer preferences vary widely across regions, channels, and retailers. You also know that too often, getting answers to questions like “What’s trending in the Midwest for Gen Z?” requires weeks of compiling decks and chasing down local data.
With CPG analytics tools, you can now access localized trends, competitor benchmarks, and consumer behaviors in seconds, helping your teams move faster and market smarter.
For example, you can:
- ✅ Customize assortments by region, channel, or retailer
- ✅ Align promotions with localized consumer behavior, maximizing relevance and ROI
- ✅ Benchmark competitor shelf velocity in key markets to identify gaps and opportunities to grow your market share.
💡 Interested in other ways you can leverage customer data for growth? Read our guide to discover how leading brands turn consumer insights in CPG into an ongoing competitive advantage.
Cross-functional decision making
In CPG organizations, marketing, sales, finance, and product teams often operate on different timelines and different data sets. That disconnect leads to slow decisions and poor collaboration. CPG analytics can unify data points across the entire business and bring them into the hands of sales, marketing, finance, and beyond.
As a result of that, sales teams can use real-time demand signals to negotiate smarter with retailers, pushing high-velocity SKUs or pulling back on underperformers. Marketing can directly link media spend to in-store velocity and shopper behavior, proving what’s driving lift by region or channel. The list goes on.
Reducing redundant research and making knowledge accessible to all
You’ll often find that as a CPG organization, you have to manage mountains of institutional knowledge, including:
- Years of consumer insights
- Past campaign performance across brands, markets, and retailers
- Retailer negotiation history, pricing agreements, and promotional terms
- Competitive intelligence drawn from syndicated data and field reports
The problem with this knowledge is that it decays fast whether through team changes or because it was trapped in siloed systems. As a result, teams often waste time searching for insights they suspect exist, only to launch projects that duplicate past work.
Modern CPG analytics helps reverse this trend by making knowledge accessibility a strategic priority:
- Centralizing past campaign learnings into searchable systems, so new teams don’t start from zero.
- Mining historical reports to uncover patterns that drive future product, pricing, and promo decisions.
- Building internal insight hubs where cross-functional teams can self-serve trusted knowledge on demand.
In other words, CPG analytics helps reduce redundant research and turns institutional knowledge into a reusable asset (not a forgotten archive) so brands can move smarter, faster, and more efficiently across teams.
Faster cross-team collaboration
26% of global project professionals cite poor cross-team collaboration as their #1 challenge—more than any other factor.
(Source)
In the CPG sector, that number might be even higher because of the nature of the business: different regions, multiple teams, and complex divisions. This makes effective collaboration difficult.
To give you a practical example, imagine you’re preparing for a major retailer pitch. The sales team needs the latest consumer trends and regional velocity data; marketing wants to align promo plans and creative with what’s actually moving off the shelf. Without connected analytics, both teams may waste days chasing different numbers or unknowingly use conflicting data in the same meeting.
With CPG analytics, this process looks very different. Sales and marketing can instantly pull from the same demand forecasts, shopper behavior data, and past promo performance, so they enter the retailer conversation fully aligned, with a clear, data-backed story.
Solutions like Capacity’s Answer Engine® scan your entire enterprise knowledge ecosystem and surface answers instantly—no need to message SMEs or rely on them to dig up reports and insights. This reduces pressure on your subject matter experts and ensures that critical insights are readily available to everyone who needs them, when they need them.
Want to see it in action? Book a free demo today.
How to use CPG analytics to continuously improve
The real value of CPG analytics isn’t just in surfacing insights. You should aim to create a cycle where those insights drive smarter planning and faster execution, over and over again.
Leading CPG teams use analytics not as a one-time report, but as the engine of continuous improvement.
Here’s how that cycle works in practice:
1. Insights
It starts by identifying what’s happening in your business today. CPG analytics gives you real-time visibility into demand signals, promotional impact, shelf velocity, and shopper behavior. Instead of relying on end-of-quarter reviews, you can spot trends and opportunities as they emerge.
2. Planning
Those insights then feed into planning. With analytics at your fingertips, marketing and sales teams can prioritize the right products, align promotions to demand forecasts, and allocate resources where they’ll drive the most impact. For example, you might decide to increase media spend in regions where shelf velocity is spiking or adjust assortments in underperforming channels.
Increasingly, CPG leaders are also using analytics to guide broader portfolio strategies, including when to expand into new channels or accelerate innovation. Companies that make long-term, transformative investments in modernizing their tech stack, including AI-powered analytics, can unlock up to a 15% point improvement in EBITDA margins. The difference between brands that continuously improve and those that don’t will only widen from here.
3. Execution
Lastly, as campaigns roll out and new product launches hit the shelf, you should use analytics to continue to track performance in near real time. Your organization can monitor compliance, assess campaign lift, and quickly pivot if needed. The data from each cycle of activity feeds right back into the next round of insights, ensuring that every plan gets smarter and more effective over time.
Metrics CPG data analytics will improve
Once you start leveraging CPG analytics solutions, you can expect to see gains across various organizational metrics, including:
- Campaign performance: Track how marketing and promotional efforts drive sales at the SKU, store, and region level.
- SKU optimization: Identify underperforming products, optimize assortment by channel and market, and inform portfolio decisions.
- Inventory planning: Align production and inventory levels with real-time demand signals to minimize stockouts and excess inventory.
- Retail execution accuracy: Understand which stores are compliant with promotional and merchandising plans, and quickly identify gaps in field execution.
- Time-to-insight: Reduce the time required to extract actionable insights from internal and third-party data, which is critical for faster innovation and speed-to-market.
- Promotional ROI: Attribute sales lift to specific campaigns, isolating variables like timing, channel, and SKU mix.
- New product launch performance: Monitor velocity, sell-through rates, and post-launch feedback to adjust go-to-market strategies in real time.
- Retailer feedback loop efficiency: Improve how quickly insights from field teams and retailers are captured and routed back to marketing, product, and sales teams.
The bottom line
In CPG, speed and alignment have never been more critical. The brands that will lead the next decade are the ones turning knowledge into a competitive edge every day.
Capacity’s AI for CPG gives your teams that edge. By making insights instantly accessible across your knowledge ecosystem and trusted external sources, it empowers faster, more informed decisions across marketing, sales, product innovation, and strategy.
If you’re ready to help your teams focus less on searching and more on driving outcomes, book a free demo today.
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FAQs
CPG analytics typically combines internal sources, like sales data, marketing performance, and supply chain metrics, with external sources such as syndicated research, retailer POS data, shopper panels, and consumer behavior insights from platforms like eMarketer, Mintel, and Euromonitor. Combining these sources provides a holistic view of product performance and market dynamics.
CPG analytics focuses on how manufacturers and brands optimize product performance, promotions, and innovation across multiple retail channels. Retail analytics, by contrast, is used by retailers to optimize store operations, assortment, pricing, and shopper experience. CPG brands often rely on retail analytics to inform their strategies, but use CPG analytics to align internal decisions across product, marketing, sales, and supply chain.
Common challenges include fragmented data across systems, lack of internal data governance, resistance to new tools, and limited AI expertise. Many companies also struggle to make insights accessible beyond analytics teams. Solutions like Capacity’s AI for CPG help overcome these barriers by connecting disparate data sources and making insights easily usable across marketing, sales, product, and executive teams.