Finding the Category Story in a pile of data

Depending on the size of your business, you might buy a lot of data or you might buy very little. No matter how much or how little you have, when you’re faced with a spreadsheet full of SKUs, measurements and numbers, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.

You then run the risk of putting numbers on a slide, but the story that actually matters to your audience doesn’t shine through.

So how do you find the story and bring it to life?

Your first instinct might be to reach for AI.

It’s quick, it’s confident, and it can summarise findings and spot patterns in seconds. But while AI can tell you what the data shows, it can’t tell you what matters most to your audience.

That’s why listening has to come first, not the data.

Before you open a single report, talk to your internal teams: commercial, brand, insights and sales. Talk about the challenges they’re facing, and think about what your buyer is wrestling with too. Find out the total retailer performance and strategic priorities.

If you're presenting internally – remember your job is to be unbiased and representative of the whole category – talk about the role of the brand, opportunities and threats – but demonstrate how it grows the whole category.

Once you have this, layer in what’s happening across the wider market and the specific retailer. Then build a picture of your category’s shoppers overlaid with consumer trends: what are they looking for, and why would they choose to shop your category at all? Outline the key objective and what it is you need to achieve.

Only then should you go into the data itself but don’t go in blindly – make sure you link it back to what you heard, what the objective is and then create an outline plan of what your presentation will look like.

Start at the top of the report: What is the category doing overall? What’s driving shopper growth or decline? Once you have a total picture you can start to narrow it down.

 Look at specific sub-segments:

• What is growing or declining?

• Which brands are doing well?

• What retailers are doing well?

• Why?

Map these findings with the wider consumer trends identified at the beginning to see if you can see any synergies or patterns. A GAP analysis is brilliant for showing you where the category is broken down, where a retailer is focusing their efforts, and how you should be splitting your own data to match.

Don’t just sit in front of your computer; get out into store and see the category for yourself, then use the data to support what you saw in real life.  We saw this recently in kids’ food and drink: the fixture had recently been reviewed, the top performing brands were on shelf – their sales doing well but something was holding the category back and that was any real presence of healthier, low-UPF products. For many parents, that’s a genuine concern, and its absence could quietly be turning potential shoppers away from the category altogether. The data alone would never have told us that.

Finally, don’t feel you need to present all the charts and findings – a buyer might have 10 minutes before they need to talk about something else.

My top tips are:

• Keep it concise

• Use pictures where you can, not lots of numbers

• Talk about their category & their shoppers

• Stick to your plan

• Remember the objective

• Keep the rest as hidden slides for back-up