As we head into 2024, there’s cautious optimism about the economy, but uncertainty lingers over how consumers will behave. Although the consumer goods (CG) industry trends toward steady growth these days, it’s harder to capture, and retailers warn about potential deflation in some categories. This year, driving growth will be more critical than ever.
Although 93% of companies are unable to grow margin and drive growth at the same time — even in the best of times — 90% of CG decision-makers expect to do so through mid-2025. But to make that happen, CG brands will need to be ready to adapt to changes faster than ever before.
Consumer goods brands can unlock opportunities across the entire route to market.
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Based on Salesforce research and consumer goods industry trends, here are the action items we think industry leaders should focus on right now:
Prepare your data for generative AI
Everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence (AI), and CG brands america phone number list are eager to see how it can transform marketing, commerce, service, and operations. But your AI’s output is only as good as the data on which it’s trained.
Across organizations, data sources are exploding, with brands averaging 976 siloed systems. For example, marketers collect data from an estimated 18 sources — up from 10 in 2021. This includes B2B and B2C data as well as consumer goods industry trends and market data.
Want AI to write marketing copy in your brand voice, create product descriptions that resonate with the product category, and generate website images that meet your consumers’ expectations? Then it’s critical your customer and product data is unified, accurate, bias-free, and secure. This means unifying and integrating data sources across the organization on a single platform, prioritizing data security so your customer data stays within your systems.
Pro tip: Cleaning up your data is important, but you don’t have to wait until everything is perfect to ramp up AI initiatives. Your data cleanup is not one-and-done — it’s an ongoing process. AI is powered by data. Collect and organize your data, identify any gaps, and continue to build and evolve your data strategy to move forward.
Use AI and automation to turbocharge hyper-personalization
When it comes to consumer goods industry trends, personalization continues to be the key to winning consumers’ hearts and wallets: 73% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. So it’s no surprise that a whopping 89% of CG decision-makers say their company is investing in personalization more than ever before.