Brainforged for Retail and CPG Brands 📊

Hi there.

Recording this video to walk through how Brainforged works with retail and CPG companies.

Our core thesis is that we build the source of truth or control plane for senior operator leadership to be able to speed up the way that they make trusted decisions and to be able to find automation wins for their back office.

and so from our experience of working with a wide range of brands, we now sit squarely in the upper mid market where we're working with brands that are doing north of 100 million in revenue at this point.

There are probably omnichannel brands.

they have retail, they have a digital channel, they probably are in wholesale and they're looking through other channels as well and figuring out where to double down at this scale.

they're working with probably dozens of, of third party vendors.

they have way too many tools that they can't just control and hook up into Google sheets anymore.

And so it becomes really important to have a data control center, where decisions can be made from.

So these are the four kind of areas where we've seen the most impact from our work and I'll just talk through them lightly.

One is around planning, commercial decisioning.

So you know every kind of executive that we've worked with, you know, has kind of just this seasonal kind of approach to running their business.

Their annual priorities, new product launches, new product launches, improvements to existing product lines, launching new channels.

They're seasonal events because CPG demand is pretty lumpy.

It's usually not year round and so there's a lot of promotions that go into driving a lot of demand, designing limited time offers, and all types of custom bespoke business rules that make the CPG brand very unique.

there's also kind of their unique blend of merchandising, advertising and personalization, kind of experiences that they want to design into their customer experience.

at the core of it all every CPG brand, you know, has a pretty transactional relationship with customers.

And so the ones that have the edge today, they're able to have good, good coverage.

They have really good lifecycle programs, they have good acquisition channels.

They have, and they make it easy to kind of spread, spread the word.

And you know a lot of those decisions are you know made by the creative operators within the brands.

And so they need the visibility to be able to understand which of their kind of focus areas their priorities should be promoted internally.

What's doing well, what are the wins that they can talk about.

And so that's really one class of decisions that we really focus on.

The second is really around marketing spend and channel investment.

LTV to CAC is really the golden kind of metric for marketing leaders.

and to be able to look that across channels, to be able to pull in additional signals so that you learn as much as you can about your customer up front from syndicated data, from competitive intelligence, from your competitors, from other retail data that you may get, and then obviously first party data that you're able to capture within your own kind of website or app or whatever other kind of surface that you already own.

and then ultimately being able to break down all the activities that stem from kind of from a marketing leader's perspective, they care about marketing efficiency ratio.

Just kind of a way to test challenge the assumptions around every dollar spent.

How efficient is it that we're getting ROI from it coming out?

And so being able to have a data lake, and an attribution model that you can control, make sure that you're comparing apples to apples and not just trusting kind of bespoke reporting that you're getting from all of the kind of tools that you're using, that's, that's crucial at this stage.

Third is around supply fulfillment execution.

So you some, some, some time you just don't have visibility because at this point fulfillment and supply is out of your hands.

The HQ is usually in an office and all these vendors are kind of out on the floor kind of working these, you know, moving the supply chain along.

So you want to make sure that you have a great pulse on supply that you have, make sure that you can support certain promotions where you are going to drive demand spikes because you're going to be experimenting with pricing and maybe you'll do some creative bundling.

and these are just like not regular experiments that you're running.

And so you don't usually have a great measure of how a limited time offer is going to go.

then there's also just reconciliation across all the different suppliers.

Maybe you have multiple suppliers, multiple warehouses, multiple, multiple fulfillment providers, they're sending you all types of documentation and you need to be able to kind of create like a master bill and understand that you're not losing inventory going from, from stakeholder to stakeholder.

and so that's, that's really you know being able to answer what constraints do we have?

what are the most pressing Operational issues that inevitably happen where we can get proactive alerts and go and solve that issue as soon as possible.

Fourth and finally is around just measurement and attribution.

So I think this is you know, very relevant to building kind of the most robust kind of customer profile.

Being able to yeah, once again it's like kind of data reconciliation, making sure that sales, everyone knows what we're talking about.

We're talking about sales, sale, sales, is it DTC sales, wholesale sales.

it's just different cuts of aggregate metrics and being able to drill down to the level of grain that you want.

that way if you're able to do that clean segmentation, you can try gala insights faster to be able to make better decisions as you, as you move forward.

so yeah, I think like where Brave Forge specifically helps in these areas.

So much of our work is around stitching together context, making sure that you know, CPG brands, they have so much data all over the place.

But is the context they have really accessible?

yes, you could just use cloud connectors.

There are a lot of creative ways to use Zapier no code low code tools to be able to go and make sure that systems start to talk to one another but they're not going to build back into a central control plane.

You need creative design and architecture in order to do that.

And so this is what we're able to do for brands and the modeling, yeah, it's not so much about kind of the activities that we do but how efficiently you're able to manage your context and make sure that the tools and processes that depend on the context are able to pull from trusted sources.

and so I've kind of broken down all the different processes into kind of areas that are not like kind of universal.

so these are all the activities that we think that you know, brand operators are working, working with and where we typically start is kind of where highlight around priorities.

So giving you full channel sales reporting, you know, website.

Whether we build this out of the box or custom or there's good out of the box tools now, where they already are basically.

they can connect to all the sources, they can load and build all the reporting, they even have chat with data features.

it just works out of the box and you don't really need so much custom setup until you get to a point where you need to start to own the definitions and change management much closer.

metric definitions.

That's really where we spend the most time, and that's what these tools won't be able to figure out for you because every business measures their business slightly differently, sometimes more than slightly.

And so when definitions disagree, calling that out, making sure that we're working with leaders, understanding what are the definitions that really do matter a lot of the definitions are kind of set in for depth.

And we'll find that 80% of the usage of, of you know, basically conversational analytics where you're chatting with your data, people are asking the same routine questions.

And so when that happens, it's kind of like when you think of it, you want to know the answer right away.

Maybe that's better served as a dashboard.

Maybe there are like deeper investigative questions that are better to chat with, through, through Claude.

and maybe there are other situations where you just want to set up an automation and it's alerting you to giving you proactive reporting, giving you proactive insights, before issues even really come up.

and then ultimately where we really plug in is we start to set up this review cadence, this weekly business review, making sure that executives are able to get the visibility that they need to be able to run their operation efficiently.

the next areas we really move into around kind of planning, investment, making sure that we can get closer to improving decisions made around the dollars that are being spen, not just around reporting.

I think reporting is typically the most urgent need that we come in on.

But if we can really help brands figure out how to spend their dollars more efficiently, that's ultimately you know, about a better partnership for us.

and so there are all types of ways that we could do that as we've discussed before.

And yeah, so This is just a sample kind of template for how we would do design partnership, with with, with a brand directly or with another services provider for a brand, that already has a relationship that's already deeply embedded in the brand.

because they have the systems of record.

Maybe they're the CRM system, maybe they're the order management system already, but they don't really have the engineering and kind of analytics chops to be able to go much deeper and really help build out this automation and insights layer our four brands.

and so brainforge is a great partner to be able to go in.

We'll help you identify what are like kind of the top three opportunities for us to go in.

really what definitions decisions can we really accelerate, and then make sure that there's a trusted path, to sequence to get there.

yeah, that's pretty much it.

The rest of the deck is kind of just an intro to who we are, what we work with, and how we operate.

So, yeah, have a look and let me know if you have any questions.