Consumer Products Industry Overview

Digital transformation, once a necessary journey, is now an urgent priority for consumer products brands. Starting with a deep understanding of your business, BCG’s consumer products consultants help clients find the right use cases to develop the digital capabilities that power consumer-centric innovation.

We begin our consumer products consulting services by partnering with you to define, test, and prove how advanced data collection and analysis, AI, digital supply chain, and other enhancements will create value—before expanding or embedding these capabilities in your operating model. We automate what’s transactional and create cross-functional teams to harness the ingenuity and innovation you’ll need to meet consumers’ changing demands.

Our Services for Consumer Products Companies

Fast-Moving Consumer Goods

Retail Industry

Fashion Industry

Luxury Goods

Alternative Proteins

How We Help CPG Companies Prepare for the Future

Customer Insights

From the food industry to consumer durable goods, managing a portfolio of products requires new methods of acting on customer insights. To guide brand investment and redraw segmentations, our Demand Centric Growth approach maps what is driving consumers' choices in each category or niche so you can build advantaged positions with strong growth potential.

Digital Marketing

Achieving digital marketing maturity is an industry-wide challenge for the consumer products industry. We help CPG companies integrate digital tools, collaborate with agencies and martech providers, and blend new talent with current staff and external creatives to drive results.

Supply Chain Management

The CPG industry was once dominated by companies that owned their value chain, but now winners are positioned to tap into a broad ecosystem of external partners. To help CPG companies make this fundamental shift to an external orientation, we start with a clean sheet to determine the functions that partners can do as well or better, and which functions are critical to keep in-house.

Personalization

To reach your consumers, you need to know where they’re looking, how they purchase—and even precisely when they’re ready to buy. Using 360˚ consumer profiles, enhanced by AI systems, and retail partnerships, we can help you create “segment of one” targeting, tailored to specific channels and capable of being scaled up to capture massive market share.

Pricing and Net Revenue Management

Pricing optimizations drive significant impact for CPG companies. We help you fund your own EBIT improvement through brand portfolio pricing, trade terms management, and dynamic pricing that answers the demands of shoppers and ecosystem supply chains alike.

Climate Change and Sustainability

There’s a significant opportunity to make sustainability a source of competitive advantage across the value chain. We help CPG companies rewire decision making to embed sustainability as a core corporate value, linking it to shareholder return.

Our Client Success with the Consumer Products Industry

A Large-Scale Cost Transformation Identifies $1 Billion in Savings

How BCG streamlined the organization and strengthened the cost competitiveness of a top consumer durables manufacturer.

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Driving Growth with an End-to-End Transformation at an Electronics Retailer

BCG helped Teknosa, Turkey's leading electronics retailer, implement an accelerated holistic transformation and get on a profitable growth path using a combination of cost discipline, bold strategic moves, and technological innovation.

Cutting Costs and Catalyzing Growth with Zero-Based Budgeting

A powerful cost transformation saved a global beverage giant $310M and unlocked $1.1B for future opportunities. Here's how.

How Heineken Is Using AI to Redefine Its Growth Strategy

Heineken’s data and AI makeover has led to transformative growth. Partnering with BCG, the company developed cutting-edge promotion methodologies and AI-powered solutions. Heineken’s Ronald den Elzen shares his insights on the company’s wide-ranging AI strategy.

Consumer Products | Client Impact | 50% | New Icon

A multinational food and beverage retailer, with supply chain organizations across more than 20 markets, engaged us to build a machine-learning algorithm to improve its demand forecast. The project increased accuracy by 4 to 18 percentage points, reduced demand planners’ time by 50%, and returned an additional 0.4% to 0.8% points EBIT.

Consumer Products | Client Impact | 200 million | New Icon

A South American electronics and furniture retailer worked with us to create a localized demand forecaster to optimize assortment at more than 1,000 stores. Our machine learning approach leveraged multiple data sets, including geolocational data, to generate demand estimates, creating potential increases of $200 million in sales and $50 million in cash margin.

Our Solutions for CPG Companies

Growth AI by BCG X

This holistic suite of AI offerings is designed to maximize the growth potential of consumer packaged goods companies. It supports data-driven decisions across and within standard commercial functions including pricing and promotion, marketing allocation, product and service innovation, and route-to-consumer sales to improve strategy, planning, and execution.

Commercial Allocation by BCG X

Commercial Allocation by BCG X offers an integrated transformation experience. Leveraging BCG’s deep expertise and transformation capabilities, Commercial Allocation optimizes marketing and commercial budget allocation across salesforce and direct-to-consumer touchpoints.

Growth AI by BCG X Recognized in POI’s 2023 Enterprise Planning Vendor Panorama Report

We were awarded four Best in Class distinctions in Promotion Optimization Institute (POI)’s 2023 Enterprise Planning Vendor Panorama Report for our tool Growth AI by BCG X. POI's annual report evaluates leading vendors to help manufacturing and consumer products companies discover the latest technology and services that drive profitable growth.

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Explore Our Insights on the Consumer Products Industry

Book

Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI

Personalization is a $2 trillion opportunity. BCG's new book offers a playbook for capturing your share of this personalization prize in the consumer industry.

Turning GenAI Concepts into Scalable Success

BMW has launched a major transformation initiative, leveraging GenAI to streamline procurement tasks, rethink processes, and improve supplier interactions. As an extension of our existing partnership around AI, BCG and BMW are now partnering with AWS, BCG X, and BCG Platinion to ensure a secure, scalable integration of GenAI.

Aerospace and Defense

Automotive Industry