The marketing science is settled, penetration growth drives brand growth, the leadership teams of major CPGs understand this, but, for many varied reasons, neither of the two major brand growth budgets focus on penetration.

Commercial / Trade budgets tend to be optimised for short-term sales volume and Brand / Agency media budgets are optimised for reach, CPM and CTR

Neither budget is structurally designed to optimise penetration. So even though CPG leadership knows that penetration growth drives market/brand growth their organisations unwittingly prevent it being optimised.

Penetration is too brand led for Commercial and too commercial for Agencies and neither have historically been able to routinely measure it and neither team are trained in the science of How Brands Grow.

That’s why it falls through the cracks.

But retail media and the data available to RMNs is the bridge that solves this.

CPGs need a new category and media planning process that leverages retailer and panel audience data.

Penetration (within the target audience) is the key KPI that should be reviewed, not just at every Retailer to Supplier top to top but at every Agency planning meeting and every meeting between retailer & supplier commercial teams.

The opportunity to leverage this by RMNs is huge, and strategically important.

It enables RMNs to be repositioned as growth drivers rather than activation planners or brand taxers.

And RMNs can sieze this opportunity because they uniquely and simultaneously influence the two key drivers of penetration growth – mental and physical availability.

No other media channel can do this and no other media channel can measure penetration growth.

And the time to this is now and its urgent.

Retail leaders are becoming impatient that their (unrealistic) expectations of untold retail media income growth are not being met quickly enough and many CPGs are treading water.

Applying marketing science principles and their focus on penetration is the way forward and Retail Media Networks are uniquely positioned to do this.