Planning the Right Experience w/ Aidan Bocci

In this episode of the Account Experience Podcast, host Adam Dorrell talks with Aidan Bocci, an expert in the global consumer goods and retail industry. For many years he was instrumental in improving consumer goods companies’ customer business planning processes.  In his career, he has worked with most of the top 100 FMCG companies (like Procter and Gamble) and advised C-Suite leaders in more than 30 of them. And now he’s the co-founder of Growzz, which is a platform to help Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies innovate on processes and to design growth activities that deliver real results.

Aidan is on a mission to change the way that consumer goods companies do better retailer business planning. Because if they change the process, or make the process much, much better, they don't just save themselves lots of time. They make great decisions. The decisions drive great behavior and the behavior drives great results for them. The impact is significant – he describes on the podcast how improving the planning process can make a 35% difference in efficiency and add nearly 5% to the growth rate.

Large CPG companies utilize key customer playbooks, and rely on complex planning processes for success – but as Aidan says “the ugly truth is often that when you peel it back, they're still doing it all in PowerPoint, and Excel”

He talks about some horror stories in modern retailers like Tesco, Walmart, and Carrefour of the waste of money when the wrong POS is delivered, and it’s then consigned to a stock room. 

And he’s outspoken on the benefits that planning adds to the experience that retailers have with CPG vendors – it’s the next battleground for improvement with digital transformation.

It’s a must-listen for players in the B2B CPG and retail channels.