CPG · Decision brief 01
Six decisions your executive team is making right now — and what the evidence says about each.
Written for a brand manager at a Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods company, deciding about their own brand. Each decision names the seat that owns it and the seat that contests it, and the brief closes with what your CFO, your customer team and R&D will say when you bring it to them.
9 pages · Evidence as of October 26, 2026 · PDF
Eleven of twelve large CPG filers publish exactly how exposed they are to one retailer. Not one of the twelve publishes how exposed it is to one brand.
The disclosure regime requires your company to measure the risk it does not control and permits it to ignore the one it does — and the second is the one you actually own. The brief carries the full twelve-filer table, including the three cautions that stop a false comparison.
What is in it
- Take price, shrink the pack, or hold the gapDomain 2 · Brand manager, contested with Finance on margin and Sales on the retailer conversation. Three large filers took three opposite price postures in the same quarter. General Mills gave back four points of price in North America Retail and still lost volume. Updated October 26: the lever now measures as spent in both directions — candy and gum prices rose 44% over five years against 22.5% for all food at home and gross margin still fell, while a 3% cut on one subcategory this season returned no volume at all.
- Renovate the core, or launch newDomain 3 · Contested with R&D on feasibility and category leadership on slotting. The "80% of new products fail" figure is a documented myth, and the peer-reviewed paper names why it survives: the self-interest of the people who repeat it.
- Trade spend, or retail mediaDomain 4 · Contested with Sales on the customer relationship. Trade spend is contra-revenue and structurally invisible; the accounting line that names it appears in two 10-K filings a year. No comparison between the two budgets reconciles to any filing.
- Absorb input cost, pass it through, or reformulate to costDomain 5 · Brand manager with Finance, contested with R&D on specification. Hershey took roughly six points of price in 2025 and lost about 610 basis points of adjusted gross margin anyway. Two reformulations in twelve months, one held, one reversed.
- Where shoppers now discover the brandDomain 12 · Contested with shopper marketing on budget. Primary measurement for this brief: ChatGPT answered all fifteen shopper questions citing no source at all, and still named competitor brands.
- Retailer and SKU concentrationDomain 9 · Contested with Finance on economics. Your Walmart exposure is published and anyone can look it up in twenty minutes. Your brand's exposure to one SKU is known to nobody outside the building.
It closes with the executive decision matrix — CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, Legal and Risk — each with something specific to do in this category, not a generic lens.
What it is not
- Not a vendor ranking. It measures decisions and evidence, not which company is better.
- Not a forecast. Where something is an observation of one window, it says so.
- Not a market-size report. It will not tell you what any of this is worth to you in revenue.
- Not padded. 9 pages because that is what the evidence filled.
How the evidence is handled
Every figure is sourced. Where a number could not be sourced, the brief says so and gives none. Where two sources disagree on direction, it says that rather than picking the flattering one. Where a widely quoted statistic comes from a party with a commercial position, it is flagged — including where that flag weakens a point the brief is making.
The decision-maker and every decision were fixed before any source was read, and were not revised to fit what came back.
None of these your decision?
The catalog briefs answer the decisions a category shares. A custom brief answers yours: one decision, one decision-maker, your market, with the question and what would prove it wrong registered before any data is pulled. See the custom brief →
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Licensing. A brief is sold for use inside the buying organization — read it, quote it internally, build on it in your own planning. It may not be resold, published in full, or redistributed outside your organization. Quoting a figure externally is fine with attribution to CULT+MATH and the as-of date, which is the part that makes the figure meaningful.