Every year CPG brands commit billions to trade promotions, pricing strategy and display space. The plans are set months ahead. Whether any of it executed correctly in store is a different question and the answer usually arrives too late to act on.

Our new guide, The Execution Gap, shows commercial leaders how to see what's happening in their stores in near real time, verify it with image-level proof and fix it while the window is still open. It's free to download.

The gap is measurable and it's costing revenue

$634B is lost across global retail every year to poor on-shelf availability. Out-of-stocks alone account for 5% of total sales, before a single pricing or promotion failure is counted. 61% of CPG manufacturers struggle to execute planned promotions and 75% struggle with modern trade complexity. For most brands, one missed execution week costs more than $1M in lost volume.

The guide sets out where the gap opens up, why the data most teams rely on can't close it and what near real-time visibility looks like in practice.
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Why the old way falls short

Most brands still manage retail execution the way they did ten years ago: manual audits, delayed data and post-mortems after the commercial window has closed. Reps spend their visits counting and logging displays instead of selling. Head office waits weeks for numbers that are already out of date.

Syndicated data doesn't close it either. Circana and NIQ measure the outcome, not the execution. They tell you volume moved, not whether the display went up. It's a modelled sample rather than your estate, so the stores that never built the display are never named.

What you'll learn inside

Where the execution gap opens up and why it's a commercial problem rather than a field problem, concentrated in the stores that matter most to your number.

What Execution Intelligence connects across the three things every commercial team already has but has never been able to link: what you planned, what actually happened in store and what it delivered.

What you can see in every store, from on-shelf availability and promotion compliance to pricing accuracy and share of shelf, all read from the same photo.

Every surface, not just the shelf. Main shelf, promotional stands, end caps, posters and POS, coolers and chillers, plus the stock sitting in the backroom while the shelf reads empty.

What each team gets from one governed dataset: trade and commercial, retail execution and field ops, RGM and commercial excellence.

Accuracy you can act on and defend

Execution data only changes a decision if nobody can argue with it. The guide covers the recognition engine behind the numbers: 95%+ accuracy across pack formats, lighting and store environments, under four weeks to go live fully catalogued and under a minute to add a new SKU before it reaches a store, matched against a library of 100,000+ SKUs.

It also explains what makes that possible. Digital twins train recognition before a product ships, so there's no cold start and no backlog of shelf photos to collect first.

Built for commercial leaders

This guide is written for the people accountable for the numbers: VP Sales, Directors of Trade, VP RGM and field operations leaders across beer and spirits, soft drinks and beverages, energy drinks and snacking. It's practical rather than theoretical, grounded in live deployments and measurable outcomes.

Real brands. Measurable outcomes.

Inside you'll find three deployments you can build a business case on. AG Barr, the UK drinks maker behind IRN-BRU and Rubicon, cut store audit time by 50% with 300+ SKUs digitised at 96% data accuracy. Sagra Technology went from onboarding to live in-store recognition in seven days, hitting over 98% accuracy on near-identical pharmaceutical packs. Randstad made store visits eight times faster across its estate in Spain.

As AG Barr's Head of Performance Analytics puts it: "Our reps spend more time selling and we have far greater confidence in our data."

Download the guide

The Execution Gap is a 10-minute read that will change how you think about trade investment, field force productivity and promotional ROI. Get your free copy and see your stores before the next peak week costs you.