How CPG companies can prove brand value

Published: 9/22/2025

Within the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, shelf space is currency. Thousands of new CPG products are launched every year, yet the average large-format grocery or supermarket store only has enough shelf space for about 40,000-100,000 unique SKUs. Retailers have finite real estate and countless brands competing to earn it. For CPG companies, success depends not only on selling to consumers but on proving non-negotiable value to retail partners.

That proof needs to extend beyond units moved or trade spend redeemed. It must answer a fundamental question business buyers ask every day: What is the brand's worth to the retailer?

CPG marketing leaders operate in a high-volume, low-margin environment, where every brand decision must pass a profitability test. This scrutiny applies not just to consumer-facing campaigns but to the B2B relationships that stand between a brand and a shopping cart.

Unfortunately, CPG marketers often operate on limited insight. Shopper marketing teams control the data, traditional brand metrics don’t translate to buyer conversations and deterministic methods like media mix modeling (MMM) don’t provide CMOs with a comprehensive view. This is where AI-powered marketing analytics platforms can make a significant difference.

Why traditional B2B marketing measurement models fall short

For decades, marketing for CPG companies has relied on MMM to justify spend. Yet, MMM was designed for scale, not nuance. It provides a high-level, historical view that struggles to attribute value across long, complex buyer journeys. It is especially weak at capturing the value of modern marketing tactics, including brand equity lift from a viral social campaign, the impact of a major sports sponsorship or the ROI of offline activations — all of which provide essential knowledge for CPG CMOs.

This leaves marketing leaders with a significant measurement blind spot. Findings from Nielsen's 2025 Annual Marketing Report underscore this challenge, revealing that marketers are struggling to prove holistic ROI as the consumer journey becomes increasingly fragmented across digital touchpoints and retail media networks.

CPG brands also face a significant challenge in accessing critical data. Because they often ship directly to retailers, they lose visibility into the end buyer. The retailer controls the customer relationship, the promotional execution and usually the final pricing.

The result is a measurement blind spot. This data gap creates friction between marketing and sales teams and their shopper marketing counterparts, who manage the direct retailer relationships and hold the keys to crucial point-of-sale data. That disconnect can lead to lost shelf space, misaligned expectations with shopper marketing teams and pressure to reduce prices.

What high-performing CPG B2B marketing looks like

Successful B2B programs in CPG are grounded in clarity, credibility and smart execution. The best teams put their money behind initiatives that actually sway merchant decisions, rather than chasing short-term lifts with margin-eroding discounts. They talk the retailer’s language, emphasizing category growth, bigger baskets and stronger customer loyalty. Having advanced tools that unify data across channels, CPG marketers can demonstrate the actual impact of their efforts, entering retailer meetings with more than just sales numbers. They can explain how a brand campaign increased foot traffic or how a sponsorship elevated the entire category, reframing the conversation from price pressure to a strategic partnership.

Read More: See how Alembic helped a leading F500 B2B technology company grow its sales pipeline with better marketing attribution and revenue forecasting.

Measure what matters, predict what’s next

At Alembic, we don't rely on MMM to measure marketing impact. Instead, the Alembic Marketing Intelligence Platform uses a proprietary causal inference engine to measure what other tools miss. This includes measuring traditionally hard-to-track investments such as brand awareness, customer loyalty and sentiment.

When CMOs use Alembic to analyze marketing data, they can:

• Predict how trade promotions and brand marketing campaigns will impact future revenue
• Justify price positioning based on past and projected category contribution
• Use brand performance metrics to defend shelf space and expand into adjacent categories
• Align marketing and sales around a shared view of retailer ROI
• Use AI-powered attribution measurement to move past deterministic assumptions
• See expected outcomes for revenue, sales velocity and product contribution margin — the exact metrics retailers care about most

Without granular buyer-level data, Alembic reconstructs time-series patterns from distributed sources and applies causal AI to reveal how marketing drives business outcomes, including those from offline activity. This leads to measurement of brand effectiveness across environments where attribution tools often fall short, including food service, wholesale and specialty retail.

Why CPG marketing leaders are turning to Alembic

Alembic was purpose-built to address the attribution challenge that most platforms overlook. It seamlessly integrates both digital and traditional channels, encompassing everything from paid media and social content to television, radio, field marketing and public relations. More than just presenting metrics, it uncovers causal relationships, answering the crucial questions of what caused what and when.

For CPG CMOs, this means fewer assumptions, faster decisions and clearer proof of how their products drive results with retail partners. Whether you’re launching a new beverage flavor, running a co-branded campaign or preparing for an executive meeting, Alembic gives you the insight needed to plan, forecast and prove value for strategic retail growth and better shelf performance. In a market where pricing pressure is constant and brand differentiation is thin, Alembic offers a distinct advantage.

To discover how Alembic can benefit your consumer packaged goods, contact our sales team today. Let's start a conversation about how we can help you achieve your marketing goals.