Parallel Tracks, Missed Opportunities
In most enterprise CPG organizations, marketing and trade promotions operate in silos. Each team has its own KPIs, platforms, and budget requests—yet both ultimately answer to the same leadership.
- Marketing aims to build brand equity and top-of-funnel awareness
- Trade aims to generate immediate lift and in-store sales
The problem? These teams compete for the same dollars, often without visibility into each other’s strategy.
CPG brands spend ~20% of revenue on trade promotions—yet 72% of U.S. promotions lose money (McKinsey).
This fragmentation leads to duplicative spend, mixed messages at shelf and screen, and lost revenue.
Local Optimization Isn’t Enough
Siloed decision-making might look productive on paper. A media team might show strong brand lift. A trade team might point to solid in-store sales from discounts. But:
Despite analytics use, 59% of global trade promotions still fail to break even (McKinsey). That’s because isolated successes rarely equal coordinated impact.
We’ve seen this across verticals, and examples of these are when:
- A powerful campaign that drives interest but falls flat because the product isn’t in-store.
- A deep trade discount that fails to convert because awareness hasn’t been built.
Optimizing for individual channels without accounting for their interplay leads to local optimization at the expense of global impact.
The reality is this: your consumers don't see “channels” and they don't care about org charts or internal swim lanes, they care about consistent, effective experiences.
Coordination Failure: A Behavioral Problem
This isn’t just operational. It’s a behavioral and structural problem.
Trade and marketing typically have different incentives, timelines, and storytelling frameworks. Each team is tasked with proving its own value. And when resources are constrained, proving impact becomes a competition.
What you get is what behavioral economists and game theorists call a coordination failure: everyone acting rationally within their silo, but missing out on a better outcome if they worked together.
Behavioral Economics + Machine Learning = Smarter Strategy
At Theory+Practice, we built Continuum AI to solve this exact problem for enterprise CPG brands.
Brands that coordinate trade + marketing using analytics and AI see up to 10% revenue growth and 28% gross margin uplift from better forecast accuracy (BCG, McKinsey).
Continuum AI helps teams:
- Quantify the combined impact of marketing + trade
- Identify where efforts conflict or duplicate
- Model better budget allocation across both functions
- Track customer behavior over isolated KPIs
It’s not about replacing human teams—it’s about enabling smarter, more connected decision-making.
What Harmonization Looks Like - A Continuum AI Case Study
One of our clients, a major CPG brand, launched a national brand campaign that exceeded expectations in terms of awareness and engagement.
At the same time, a trade promotion was running—but for a different SKU group.
Individually, both initiatives succeeded. But because they weren’t aligned, the campaign failed to convert the interest it generated. The SKUs promoted in-store didn’t match those featured in the ads.
Using Continuum AI’s behavioral journey modeling, we helped them restructure their planning.
✅ The Result: In the following quarter, with aligned messaging and promotions, they saw a 2.5x lift in promotional ROI.
From Tactical Silos to Strategic Multipliers
This work requires a mindset shift:
From:
- “Who owns the customer?”
- “Which team gets the budget?”
To:
- “What does the customer need at each stage?”
- “How can we maximize impact together?”
Key questions to ask:
- How does media shape expectations at the point of sale?
- Are trade mechanics reinforcing or conflicting with brand messaging?
- What happens between exposure and purchase?
- Where are we unintentionally working at cross-purposes?
Our Conclusion: Measure Success by Impact, Not Department
When marketing and trade work as strategic multipliers, not tactical silos, the customer experience improves—and so does business performance.
Continuum AI by Theory+Practice enables this shift:
From fragmented planning to harmonized execution.
From KPI contests to measurable, coordinated growth.
Continuum AI helps CPG brands move from the 59% of companies losing money on promotions to becoming best‑in‑class—with more accurate forecasts (+72% vs 42%) and gross margin uplifts (~28%). Coupled with AI-powered marketing, that translates into the +10% revenue growth that top-tier CPGs realize and reclaim margin otherwise lost to siloed planning (BCG, McKinsey).
Ready to Turn Your Data into Impact?
If your organization is facing complex decisions and underused data, let’s talk. We’ll help you turn theory into measurable business outcomes.
