Shopper Marketing: Profiting from the Place Where Suppliers, Brand Manufacturers, and Retailers Connect

4. How Consumer Goods Manufacturers Work

We have spent some time discussing how retailers work. Now let’s shift to the other critical player in shopper marketing, the consumer goods firms that are referred to interchangeably in the industry as manufacturers, brand marketers, vendors, suppliers, CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies, and FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) firms in Europe. These represent the firms that want to sell brands in retailers. We use the term manufacturers predominantly just for consistency.

Shopper marketing is a discipline driven largely by manufacturers. It is a way, as we have said, for manufacturers to work in more strategic ways with retailers to close the deal at the first moment of truth (at the shelf purchase ...