Edgewood Consulting Group Bring us the decision

Check the plan with the trade before the launch spends the money.

Edgewood Consulting Group interviews the retail buyers who will decide whether your plan gets shelf. We report what they said, what it means for the plan, and what to do next.

The decision under review Retail buyer interviews Report with implications Go, change or stop The decision under review Retail buyer interviews Report with implications Go, change or stop Bring us the decision

Three decisions this is built for

  1. Enter a category

    You have a product and a category you do not sit in yet. The buyers who run that shelf know what they are short of and what they would refuse. We ask them before your sales team has to.

  2. Launch an item

    The item is designed and the sell-in window is set. Buyers will tell us whether the gap you see is a gap they see, and what it would take for them to list it.

  3. Change the shelf

    You want the category merchandised differently. The buyer may have tried it already, or may want something else entirely. Better to know before the planogram work begins.

What you receive

Interviews with the buyers, directors and category managers who own your category at major retailers in every channel that matters: Food and Drug, Mass and Club, Dollar and Online. They are conducted by Edgewood's senior consultants and written up as a report your leadership can act on. Every finding is tied to an implication for your plan and a recommended action.

What it is not

Not consumer research

Shopper studies tell you whether people would buy. A trade check tells you whether the retailer would stock the item, and on what terms. Plans need both, and this is the one most plans skip.

Not a deck handed off

The consultants who ran the interviews present the findings, work the implications through with your team and stay involved while the decision is made.

Not a survey

Buyers do not fill in questionnaires for us. They talk to senior people who know their category, so the answers are specific, candid and useful.

The wider practice

Insights

The trade check sits inside a research practice that also runs shopper decision hierarchy studies: how shoppers choose within a category, which items they switch between and which they walk away from. Retail buyer interviews give the trade view; the hierarchy work gives the shopper view. Together they explain why a category behaves the way it does.

Innovation

Category thought-leadership platforms that make your brand the retailer's first call on where the aisle should go, alongside category management and shopper marketing strategy. This is where a trade check often leads once the buyer's expectations are known.

Implementation

AssortmentEdge®, our assortment optimization service, run retailer by retailer against the live planogram so recommendations are item-level and buyer-ready. RevenueEdge™ simulates a whole category's market and ties launch and discontinuation choices to margin, so net revenue management teams decide on more than operational grounds. Analysis of pricing and of trade promotion sits alongside both. In every case our team does the analysis and stays through implementation.

How to start

Tell us which decision is pending, and which categories and channels it touches. We will come back with the buyers we would interview and how we would run it.

Bring us the decision