Growth Starts with the Core

In the third part of our Annual Business Planning (ABP) series, we shift focus to something often overlooked in planning cycles: driving growth through your core.

In our first article (Unlocking Value Early On), we addressed a common pitfall: building a plan around the “new and shiny.” When there are few standout innovations, teams often stall, unsure how to craft a compelling growth story. But the truth is, growth doesn’t start with invention. It starts with clarity.

Why Growth Doesn’t Always Start with What’s New

During my years at Unilever, I helped launch dozens of products, some with big national rollouts, others as retailer exclusives. And across all that experience, two types of innovation consistently stood out:

1. Flavour-led innovation anchored in brand identity. Think Axe: every year, a bold new variant backed by a high-energy campaign. Some years hit harder than others, but the pipeline never missed in terms of impact and brand consistency.

   
   

2. Consumer-value-driven innovation: like P&G’s introduction of pods and fragrance beads in laundry. These offered a tangible improvement to the consumer experience, not just a trend-chasing twist.

But for every one of those success stories, there were eight or nine product launches that landed with a thud. And almost all of them came with the same sales pitch: “this is a growth driver based on consumer trends.”

Yes, trends matter. But relevance matters more. Take protein. It’s an undeniable macrotrend in food, but now it seems like every category feels compelled to jump on the bandwagon, even when it makes no sense. A few years ago, Signal (a value-focused toothpaste brand in Belgium) tried to launch a premium therapeutic line to follow a category trend. The result? A quick and predictable flop.

Exhibit 1: Signal Neo-Repair Launch

One of the most common claims from marketers is that innovation drives penetration. That may be true in select cases, but the reality is, in most categories, penetration is driven by your core[1]. Innovations tend to attract those already invested in the category. They’re useful, but more for premiumisation than mass reach.

In consumer goods, penetration is still the holy grail and the path to growing it almost always runs through your existing portfolio. In this next section, we’ll help you uncover the hidden growth potential in your core: how to spot opportunities, how to prioritise, and how to turn the basics into your biggest advantage.

There is a vast amount of analysis you could do. We propose starting with the basics. We identified five basics everyone should master:

Five Must-Have Analyses to Drive Growth from the Core

When it comes to unlocking growth, the temptation is often to jump straight into complex analytics. But most businesses don’t need more complexity, they need more clarity.

We recommend starting with five essential analyses that every team should master. Done well, they offer a clear view on where to focus, where to course correct, and how to turn insights into action.

1. Growth & Profit

Start with your P&L. Which categories and subcategories are driving growth or decline? Break it down into specific volume and price drivers. Then, go deeper: what's your €/L and margin in each segment? This isn’t just about understanding performance, it’s about identifying where to act depending on your goal (share, profit, or topline). It gives you a strategic lens to prioritise your focus.

2. Over-Under Fair Share:

This one’s simple in theory, powerful in practice: where are you and your retailer over- or underperforming versus the fair share benchmark? Using sell-out data, compare your market share (or the retailer’s) to what it “should” be in a given segment. You can do this analysis on different levels (total category, subsegment, etc). The biggest opportunities? Where both you and the retailer have headroom to grow. Watch out for the trap: because this analysis compares to an average, everything is technically over or under fair share. Focus on the outliers. And always consider context, if you’re not listed at hard discounters, you’ll naturally skew high everywhere else.

Exhibit 2: Over-Under Fair share Matrix for fictive coffee brand

3. Profit Pool:

Understand who makes money: where, and how much. Map the profit split between you and the retailer by category, brand, or SKU. This gives you early warning for upcoming negotiation friction and insight into where you may need to over- or under-invest. It also helps guide decisions about mix optimisation: which SKUs grow profit for both parties? You could add them to your second placements. Extra Tip: run your profit pool analysis on both base and total (incl. promo) turnover. Promotional funding can significantly impact retailer margins, positively or negatively. Ignoring it means missing the full picture.

Exhibit 3: Slide on Fictive Profit Pool of Bean vs Ground Coffee

4. Promotions: There are two key levels of promo analysis:

• Topline view: Understand overall promo pressure by brand and category—and how it compares to the market.

• Promo-by-promo view: Drill into execution and ROI. What worked? What didn’t? A simple effectiveness metric: incremental turnover per € of cost.

Be careful here. Promo data is often noisy, and sample sizes can be misleading. Always factor in support (e.g., folder placement, in-store execution) before drawing hard conclusions. In some categories even weather can play a key role.

5. Distribution:

Distribution is a daily fight: for shelf space, store count, and retailer priority. It never stops. This isn’t a once-a-year task, it’s a daily discipline, every year. Start by checking: do you have optimal distribution of your top SKUs? Are national bestsellers listed everywhere they should be? Don’t just look at value or volume, consider uniqueness too. Many overestimate the benefit of switching SKUs without factoring in cannibalisation. Then, identify where your distribution is low and build a plan to fix it. If you have access to detailed retailer data, pinpoint gaps down to the store level. Sometimes a smart switch in distribution can drive profitability for both sides.

From Insight to Action

Each of these analyses is valuable on its own, but the real power comes when you bring them together. Use a simple framework to connect insights across categories and customers. That’s when patterns emerge, and a growth story begins to take shape.

You may discover, for example, that turnover is declining in a key segment despite competitive promo pressure, but profitability is still strong. That could point to an opportunity: increase investment, build a mix case, and negotiate for better distribution.

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At Falcon, we support clients in building these capabilities, sharing our templates, frameworks, and practical playbook to help teams move from insight to impact. Beyond the basics, we also offer deeper dives into pricing, full retailer audits, promotional investment strategy, digital execution, and more.

If you’re interested in learning more or want to benchmark your current planning process, feel free to reach out. We’re happy to exchange thoughts. Contact us through jonas.geleyn@falcon-consulting.be

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SOURCES

[1] The Biggest Contributor to Brand Growth, Bain & Company, 2014. https://www.bain.com/insights/the-biggest-contributor-to-brand-growth/