Effie at EPP RGM Forum America 2025: Shaping RGM for tomorrow

The debut U.S. edition of the EPP FMCG/CPG Revenue Growth Management Forum gathered the brightest minds in CPG, retail, and technology to explore one question: How do we drive profitable growth in a market defined by complexity, fragmentation, and speed?

Held in Chicago, the forum brought together category and revenue growth leaders, data strategists, and innovators shaping the next generation of Revenue Growth Management (RGM). Across keynotes, workshops, and roundtables, the same message echoed — growth now depends on alignment, insight, and intelligent execution.

Consumer at the Center

The forum opened with a strong reminder: growth starts with understanding why people buy.
Sessions such as “Consumer-Centric Innovation — Aligning Products with Shopper Demand” and “The Future of Omnichannel: Integrating E-commerce and In-Store Experiences” emphasized the new reality — shoppers don’t distinguish between channels.

Industry voices from leading CPG players reinforced this shift. Constellation Brands shared how the company uses shopper intelligence to adapt pack-price architecture in its beer portfolio, ensuring value perception aligns with changing consumption moments and occasions. This perspective highlighted how understanding consumer motivations across segments — not just channels — is now a competitive differentiator.

AI and Analytics: From Insight to Impact

If 2024 was the year of AI experimentation, 2025 is about operationalization.

Industry leaders shared how CPG organizations are now embedding AI directly into RGM workflows — from promotion forecasting to execution verification and data harmonization.

BIC’s Hasan Guliyev, RGM Lead for the DACH region, noted that success increasingly depends on connecting analytics to daily decision-making: “It’s no longer enough to know what happened — RGM must help predict what to do next”.

As Kelly Rolader from BIC put it, “RGM must evolve from descriptive to prescriptive — from analysis to action.”

At effie, this is exactly where our AI-driven platform delivers value: connecting reports, field data, and visual insights into one operational flow that ensures compliance, visibility, and measurable ROI.

Data: The Foundation for Everything

Across both days, one theme never left the stage — data quality and structure are make-or-break for RGM.

Sessions on data mastery explored how inconsistent or siloed information undermines even the most sophisticated revenue strategies. Representatives from Bacardi and Constellation Brands both underlined that progress depends on unifying retail and consumption data into centralized RGM ecosystems, making decisions auditable and outcomes visible.

“You can’t optimize what you can’t see, and you can’t scale what you don’t trust,” one panelist shared — a sentiment echoed across sessions.

Effie’s approach — integrating AI with data from field execution, systems, and cameras — directly answers that need, bringing structure to fragmentation and clarity to action.

Change Management: Scaling RGM Beyond Pilots

Transformation doesn’t stop at strategy. The toughest part, as multiple sessions highlighted, is embedding new capabilities into daily workflows.

“Managing Change Across RGM Implementation” explored how to move organizations from resistance to results. From BIC’s “Sustaining Change Momentum” to Constellation Brands’ “Playbook to Scale RGM,” one truth stood out: the right mindset, skill set, and toolset must evolve together.

Both companies emphasized that RGM maturity is achieved not through one-off pilots, but through continuous learning across commercial, finance, and marketing teams.

AI is part of that toolset — but culture and alignment are what make it stick.

Retail Collaboration and Shared Profitability

As markets mature, retailer–manufacturer dynamics are being rewritten.

Discussions on shared profitability highlighted how retailers and leading CPGs are rethinking collaboration through joint planning frameworks and performance transparency. Speakers from Bacardi and Constellation Brands pointed out that the most profitable partnerships are those grounded in consumer trust and shared visibility into promotional outcomes.

Instead of negotiating margins in isolation, leading CPGs are building shared frameworks for measuring mutual success — a “triple win” model for consumer, manufacturer, and retailer.

That’s a philosophy effie shares: visibility, trust, and execution consistency as the foundation of long-term growth.

Effie’s Takeaways

The conversations in Chicago reinforced what effie believes at its core:

• AI is no longer experimental — it’s essential.
• Data is the growth engine.
• Change is only sustainable when people, processes, and platforms are aligned.
• Execution is where strategy becomes reality.

Effie’s mission remains simple: to ensure that every agreement, promotion, and shelf decision is executed as intended — powered by AI, grounded in data, and aligned across partners.

Because in today’s CPG landscape, real growth isn’t found in reports — it’s verified in execution.