Why CPG Product Decisions Are Often Strategic Gambles

Every entrepreneur knows the feeling of standing at a crossroads. You have a product idea or a decision about your current lineup, and you need to decide which way to go.

To find the answer, most people look at two things:

• WHAT happens in the market

• WHY it happens

But in the current CPG industry, these two things are fundamentally broken.

1. The “What” Without the “Why” (The Blind Scoreboard)

The WHAT includes your internal sales data (the so-called “Sell-In”) and external retail data sources, such as NIQ or Circana (often called “Sell-Out”). It’s the “scoreboard.” It shows you sales volume, market share, and price points. It tells you what’s going on in the market and how you’re performing.

The problem? Too many people look only at the numbers. In fact, too many people look only at their numbers—because that’s all they have. Sometimes they also look at Retail Syndicated Data sources such as Circana, NIQ, and Spins (which have significant coverage issues), see that a competitor is growing or their own sales are dipping, and react. But the “What” is silent. It doesn’t explain the reason for the movement.

• The Bottom Line: If you only care about the WHAT, you are watching a scoreboard without watching the game. You know you’re losing, but you don’t know if it’s because of your packaging, your ingredients, or your pricing. You are changing variables without knowing which one is actually broken.

2. The “Why” Without the “What” (The Faster Horses)

The WHY is the consumer driver. It’s the reason people say they buy things. This is usually gathered through surveys, focus groups, or customer interviews.

The problem here is that the “Why” often exists in a vacuum. If you ask a thousand people in a survey if they want a “healthy snack,” they will say yes. But if your survey (the Why) isn’t directly connected to what they are actually spending money on (the What), you are making decisions based on what people wish they did, not what they actually do. Henry Ford once said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

• The Bottom Line: If you only care about the WHY, it’s like knowing some players’ stats and predicting how the game will end. You might know that a group of consumers showed interest in something, without ever knowing if they would be willing to actually purchase it. You might think you know the successful variables, but you have no real proof.

3. The Fragmentation Trap: Why Different Sources Don’t Work

A very expensive option—unaffordable for many—is trying to use both. Unfortunately, most people today get the "What" and the "Why" from different places. They buy a sales report from one giant data provider and then hire a different agency or use a survey tool to find out the “Why.”

This is structural nonsense for three reasons:

• Incoherence: The people in your survey aren’t the same people in your sales report. The data doesn’t line up. Your sales might be down, but your surveys say people love you. Now what?

• Cost: You are paying two “entry fees” for two different sets of information that don't talk to each other.

• Speed: By the time you’ve tried to stitch these two “Frankenstein” reports together, the market has already moved.

4. The Solution: Unified Causal Visibility

To make a successful decision, the What and the Why must be native to the same ecosystem.

You need to see the sale and the reason for that sale in the same breath. This is what we call Causal Visibility. When your data is unified at the source, the confusion disappears. You don’t have to wonder if the survey was wrong or if the sales dip was a fluke. You can see exactly which part of a product or a market trend—the claims, the price, or the ingredients—is driving the numbers.

The Bottom Line

Success isn’t about having the most data. It’s about having coherent data you can act upon.

If you look at only the numbers, you’re blind. If you look at only the surveys, you’re guessing. And if you get them from different places, you’re wasting money. To win, you must see the full picture from a single, unified source.