Category Strategy Funnel

Category Strategies should be a roadmap to drive your business in the short and long term

How do you develop an effective category strategy?

Effective category strategies start by identifying consumption opportunities for your target consumers, focusing on propensity rather than trying to push sales.

The most successful category strategy projects are collaborative with marketing, category and sales teams working together from the start.

This collaborative approach combines consumer, shopper and customer perspectives all the way through the process, reducing time to execute and implement.

Steps to successful Category Strategy development:

The category strategy development process is often referred to as a category strategy funnel.

Effective category strategy funnels starts with analysis into the trends and motivations that are relevant to your target consumers.

This helps brand teams to identify potential in consumption opportunities for their target consumers, these opportunities are often referred to as Demand Spaces.

The space refers to the gap, a gap between what your target consumers want or need versus the current offering (within the category) 

Once a business has identified unmet or changing needs for their target consumers, the next step is to identify how the business can meet these needs and drive growth, hence the terminology Category Drivers.

Drivers work best when they embody and clearly convey the consumption opportunity because this makes it so much easier for everyone involved to imagine what needs to be done to deliver against each category driver, and makes the process of developing the tactics, Enablers incredibly straight-forward!

This all speeds up execution and reduces time to implementation delivering growth for the business and their customers. 

What makes the Dynamic Reasoning approach to category strategies so successful?

We apply our tried and tested approach of Propensity Analysis to developing category strategies and category management projects.

This means focusing on propensity to increase consumption and therefore purchase, rather than starting with the shopper and working back.

Ultimately this creates a sustainable category strategy rather than one that’s heavily reliant on pushing products into the shoppers’ basket. 

Plus this delivers what buyers are looking for which is evidence of incremental category growth, making it easier to sell the category vision and plans externally.

Like to know more?

Please click here to arrange a call if you would like to discuss your category strategy and the areas you think you'd like to develop or strengthen. 

Alternatively please email if you have any questions or would like to know more about ways we can refresh or strengthen your category strategy.