The consumer and retail consulting market is fragmenting. Specialists are winning deals that used to go to the big firms – and the clients driving that shift aren't going back.
2 partners from this year's Top Consumer & Retail Consulting Firms ranking break it down.
Keith Fogerty from Advancy and Shikha Jain from Simon-Kucher share what's actually happening in the market – revenue growth pressure, AI's real role, private equity's tightening standards, and why a pretty PowerPoint that collects dust is a failed engagement.
If you're building a career in consumer or retail consulting, or running a practice in this space, this is the market intelligence you can't get anywhere else.
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Transcript: Consumer & Retail Consulting in 2026 – Straight from the Top Firms
Abi (Moderator): Hi everyone, my name is Abi Chen and yes, you're absolutely right. I am dialing in from Austin, Texas. So I'll be moderating the panel today and personally, I'm super excited to learn from our experts today on the panel because not only did I come from a consulting experience myself, I'm one of the coaches with Management Consulted, but also my personal passion lies in consumer retail. I've helped a friend build a new snack brand, now we're at Whole Foods, and I'm personally building a food concept here in Austin, Texas. So I'm super excited for our discussion.
Without further ado, we can get started. So to our panelists, wanted to start with a broader question to kick us off. So we know that consumer and retail consulting looks pretty different today than it did just five years ago. For those who may be less familiar with your firms, where do you sit in today's market and what kind of problems are your clients bringing to you most often?
Where Advancy and Simon-Kucher Sit in the Market
Shikha (Simon-Kucher): I'm gonna take this one first. And so Simon-Kucher, for those that are not very familiar with the firm, we focus on revenue growth, we focus on commercial strategy, pricing topics, everything that relates to the top line. And we don't do — it's more important also to say what we don't do at Simon-Kucher — is things like ops consulting, tech implementation, human resources, supply chain, procurement, all of that. So we focus on everything that drives revenue for a business.
And if we talk about the last five years, the one thing that is true is permacrisis. It's a term that I have come to love. This idea that we're in a constant state of volatility, or what I mean by we, I mean businesses, are in a constant state of volatility. If I rewind the tape a little bit, we started the decade in the pandemic. And so all of a sudden we were operating in a very different environment and learning how to do work and learning how to still sell products and services in the consumer and retail space remotely. From there, we then had a lot of demand. Consumers had stimulus checks, interest rates were low. We used that to fuel consumption.
Fast forward, that led to supply chain crises that also further drove inflation up, and that's when we started to talk about inflation. Since then, we've had things like mortgage rates being too high, further inflation, inflation fatigue, cost of living has gone up significantly for daily expenses, not just for everything that is non-essential.
Last year we had a lot of tariff rumbling. This year we have fuel crisis challenges. So you throw in the fact that every six months the market landscape, the macro landscape is changing. And so as a consultant that deals with trends, that is dealing with what do you do now? How do you both drive impact for the short term as well as grow for the long term? We have to be flexible. And I'm sure we'll get into this topic more, but how do we find ways to now navigate the new topic, which is AI and how AI is going to displace decision making or aid consumers in their purchase journeys?
Abi: Thanks so much, Shikha. Keith?
Keith (Advancy): Yeah, sure. I mean, first of all, thanks for the invitation. Excited to be here and to share some perspective. I think to answer your question, at Advancy, I mean, we're obviously a management consulting firm, but I think what makes us different is a handful of things. First of all, we focus on specific industries. One of those is the consumer and retail markets where I lead the firm's North American practice.
I think within that consumer and retail segment of our business, there's probably three things that make our business or our practice a little bit unique. The first is the clients. So while we do a lot of strategy work for corporate clients, I would say versus the average consulting firm we're probably a little bit overexposed to the private equity industry and the broader M&A market, with about half of our business being transaction driven.
The second is our approach to consumer. So in addition to pure consumer and retail, I'm also responsible for what I'll broadly define as our ingredient practice. So a lot of our projects and particularly our projects in consumer, in the food, beverage and consumer goods more broadly, we come at it through the lens of the ingredients. So understanding how and what the product is actually made of, not just the end product.
And then finally, a heavy focus on strategy projects. So there's other partners in my firm that have very strong capabilities in organizational work, operational work, things like that. I don't. So my projects and my expertise tend to skew more heavily towards what I would consider market studies, growth strategy, or five or ten-year plans. So I think my perspective and the problems that customers are bringing to myself are probably a little bit nuanced versus the broader market.
Why Buyers Are Asking Different Questions Today
Abi: Well, thank you both for giving us an overview of where your firms sit. And as we've discussed, change is definitely the theme that we'll be diving more deeply into for the rest of the panel. So interestingly, when we conducted this year's ranking research, one thing came up repeatedly. Consumer consulting is now becoming more operational and more execution oriented. So what changed? Why are buyers asking different questions today than they were just two to three years ago? Keith, can you help us get started with this one?
Keith: Yeah, so I mean, given what I just said about the type of work I do, my perspective might be a little bit skewed, but I do think that statement is true. That said, I think there's a little bit of nuance to it from my perspective. And I think based on our projects, two things have changed that clients are looking for.
One, even versus two, three, four years ago, clients really want advisors that know what they're talking about. They want subject matter experts beyond even just the partners doing the selling. They want the team and particularly the leaders on the project, the managers or the principals, to have experience in whatever the topic is or the industry is that the project is focused on. Being just very well credentialed doesn't really cut it anymore and you need to have background in the topic you're giving other people advice on. I think that's the first thing.
The second thing is, I think, and it speaks to your question maybe a little bit more, is they very much want realistic and what I'll call actionable advice and strategies. I think the days of a third-party rubber stamp on an existing project are coming to a close. Customers want advice that they can take and activate. Even if they don't want a huge amount of implementation from my perspective, I think they do want a very clear roadmap on how to achieve something and not just a pretty presentation with a bunch of buzzwords that they don't know what to do with. At least that's my perspective.
Shikha: Yeah, let me share a slightly different point of view on this. So Simon-Kucher, because we have that top line focus, because it's all about revenue growth and how do we drive profit through commercial strategy and other top line initiatives, and because we have that functional expertise, we go very broad, right? So maybe something to add to the introduction is that Simon-Kucher, we work in all industries across anything under the sun. We like to say basket to casket, cradle to the grave, right? There's very few industries that we have not touched because we have that functional expertise. And within consumer retail, this includes FMCG, durable goods, so FMCG being fast moving goods, durables being slow moving goods, all form CPG, retail services, restaurants, leisure travel, tourism, everything that basically there is a B2C component or a B2C motion.
Now, because pricing is one of those very actionable levers that you can pull in a business, and especially in a B2C business because you can see you can make those changes, you know, if you're a retailer, you can make those changes on shelf right away and see impact. If you are a service provider, you can make the changes to your plans or products. CPG takes a little bit longer, especially if you're selling into retail, right? And that motion, the B2B2C motion, you might have a bit of a delay effect. But on the whole, the work that we do tends to lead to outcomes very quickly.
And so we've always been of the philosophy that we're building a roadmap, yes. But it's always about what kind of actions can you take now. And so our recommendations tend to be, here's the two to three things that you can do today, very much in the now, right? Especially public companies and even private equity, which is a big part of our book of business, everyone wants impact now. So you have to be operationally focused. You have to give recommendations that are gonna be viable, that are bought in, that no one has questions about. And to do that, we co-create. And yeah, that sounds like a bit of a consulting buzzword, but it's very true, right? You have to be in the room with the team that's gonna not just direct the work, but is going to own the work after you're gone, and make sure that it gets done and make sure that the recommendations don't get Frankensteined. Because that's the other thing that can happen. You might make a very specific, actionable, measurable recommendation, but the client may morph it and it is no longer the recommendation you made and so may not have the same kind of results.
So we do tend to be a little bit more involved in implementation if there's a possible avenue to do so or at least continue to remain being a sounding board even when engagements are over. Part of that is just something that is consulting as a relationship business. So that's what's important. And secondly, we rely a lot on referrals and repeat business. I mean, 75% of our business tends to be word of mouth. And that for us is very important that everything we do gets implemented, there's execution against it. For us, the biggest failure point is probably the same thing that Keith said, which is if it is a pretty PowerPoint with lots of pictures and graphs that collects dust in a drawer, that is the worst outcome for a consulting engagement.
Revenue Growth Management Becomes a Boardroom Topic
Abi: Great. Thank you both so much. So another trend, another shifting trend that we have seen is 10 years ago very few executives were talking about revenue growth management, but today it's becoming a boardroom topic. Why has revenue growth management become so important and what are companies still getting wrong about it? Shikha?
Shikha: So this is what we do, right? We do revenue day in and day out. So maybe I have a bit of blinders on because in my mind I'm like everyone I talk to and all my clients are constantly talking about revenue growth because that's why they're bringing us in. What I will tell you is I've been doing this for 15 years. I've been at Simon-Kucher for almost 15 years, and yes, this topic of if you think about profit, right? You cannot have positive profit without revenue, and that's like we all know number one KPI that businesses are measured on is profit or EBITDA or operating income. Pick your specific metric. But a business usually always has costs. It's very hard to bring costs down to zero, right? And so revenue is really — I'm not biased, of course not — but revenue is the most important number on any P&L because without it you can never have profit. And costs can go down to zero, but revenue has no limit.
And so once C-suite and the board have recognized, especially the fact that we live in highly turbulent, macro volatile times, where we have to raise prices because costs are going up to maintain margin. But if we raise prices too much, we might lose volume, we might lose loyalty, we might lose traffic. So how do we find this sweet spot? If we don't raise prices, maybe we'll keep volume, but then our margins will erode and can we accept that? So there's all of these tradeoffs — that's the number one rule in business in life, is that we're constantly making tradeoffs. And so how do we find the balance or how do we find the sweet spot between where we're willing to go?
So from my perspective, just because I've been breathing and living this for over a decade, I'd say I always thought it was a C-suite topic. It has over time become a C-suite topic or a CEO topic because usually there's a chief commercial officer or something like that, or the finance team takes care of it. But now it's becoming a boardroom topic. So boards are challenging the CEO and the C-suite. What are you doing and how are you finding ways to grow margin? Obviously you can find cost containment and be good there and cost reduction. But if you don't work on the revenue side of this profit equation, you're never gonna be able to grow stock price or hit your EBITDA targets if you're privately held and so on.
Keith: Yeah, maybe just to add to that, and I mean I don't wanna restate everything that's been said, but I agree with a lot of the things Shikha said. I mean it's always been I think a topic. It's maybe come to a head a little bit recently, as consumers push back on pricing. I mean in some categories, particularly in center of store, things are getting more competitive and there's a need to plan your promotion and trade spend a little bit better. I think there's added pressure from retailers. I mean there's always been pressure to share margin with them or share revenue with them. But as they continue to develop and improve their private label products, I think it becomes a little bit more complicated. And I think, I mean again as Shikha said, it's top of mind of a lot of C-suite and board members that we interact with.
I guess the one thing I would add or point out is that at least from my perspective, I mean fully embracing revenue growth management — in some ways, the C-suite and even the board instituting a tool or a strategy around revenue growth management can not be enough. I mean, it's a lot of times that approach takes kind of a cultural shift, I think, in terms of the day-to-day teams working on it. And in some cases, that transition and seeing very strong results can outlast even the tenure of the C-suite. So I think it's a very big topic, one that is obviously very important and also one that is a very long-term topic that takes reinforcement over time.
Why Specialist Firms Are Winning Deals
Abi: Yep, absolutely. One of the surprises in this year's ranking that we saw was the strength of specialist or boutique firms. So can you give us an example of a client situation where the deep category expertise mattered more than the scale? Keith, can you kick us off?
Keith: Sure. So maybe I'll give an actual example that just happened last week. I mean I won't give away client details and things like that, but I think it is a good example. So to give the setting, I mean it was a private equity driven M&A transaction and we basically had to do two things. One was figure out who — so we'd received a target's customer list blinded — and we had to, one, figure out who the customers were of the target, and two, understand how the main customer, who we knew was a protein powder brand, how they were expected to perform.
I think because we spend so much time in those categories and that ecosystem, what we were able to do is kind of reach out to people that in some ways I consider friends and ask them, hey, is this your supplier? To figure out who the number one customer was. Once we were able to do that and identify who the customer was, we were able to go out to category managers at Walmart and Costco and Whole Foods and you name it. And again, these were people we already knew and asked them, hey, how is this brand performing and what does its future look like from your perspective?
And I think that's something anyone can do, you know, with an expert network, I guess you could say, but it would, I think, take a number of weeks to find the right people. And we were able to do it in a couple of days, which is important when you're on a strict M&A schedule. And I think that speaks to what we tried to do overall in the categories or the industries that we focus on the most. I think a very good consultant is less hired help and is instead kind of an active player in the industries that they focus on and very much part of the broader ecosystem of those industries. So I think that's a good example.
Abi: Yeah, thank you so much, Keith. I personally have done dozens of private equity due diligence, so I understand what you say. When you can cut down the time from weeks to just a few days, I'm sure your PE client really appreciated that.
Keith: Yeah, they tend to be clients that want the answer yesterday.
Abi: Yep. And Shikha?
Shikha: So I have really dug into this concept, this T-shaped concept. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where you have deep expertise in one area, right? And then you have a little bit of secondary expertise that goes across or that allows you to be flexible. And I think the reason that specialist firms are winning a lot more is because, you know, costs — all businesses have to get ROI, return on investment. Every business needs to make sure that money that they're spending on consultants, they get the value. And so if you don't have, if you're not an expert in something, or if you don't give practical advice in something, then it's just paper, right? At that point, all you've done, businesses have just paid for paper. And they don't want that.
So given that my expertise, my T here is pricing and pricing adjacent topics like anything revenue related, and the top of my T is all of the consumer industries. I span across retail primarily, but services as well, on-site restaurants, gym memberships, a lot of leisure travel tourism, point-to-point. And I can do pricing because I have that depth in pricing.
So there are times when if we are asked by a client to bid for work and it's us versus more generalist firms, yeah, sometimes if everything gets bundled in and they get like a full overhaul or a full set of topics and they can do everything, great. But if pricing is really in the crosshairs, or if someone asked me, can you help me do supply chain optimization? I'd be like, no, and I'm not gonna bullshit you. Right? Because I have zero experience, I have zero benchmarks. I could try to learn the industry, right? And that's the thing. We all think consultants are smart so they can learn and they can ramp up and so they'll become experts in a few weeks. That's actually not true.
And this goes back to Keith's earlier point, is that clients want you to have the expertise from partner to consultant to associate, right? Everyone needs to know what they're doing. And so I've been in situations where we do say no, like, listen, this cannot be us. And I mean, most of the time our clients know not to even ask us for these types of topics. Because I think people's bullshit meters are very strong. They can smell it from a mile away, right?
And so I think the more you can just focus on doing what you're really good at, building those 10,000 hours in specific areas that excite you and you have interest in, that's gonna be winning. Now, oftentimes, and I don't want to give you a client example because for me this is like every client example, right? They're like, hey, we need to grow revenue. And so Simon-Kucher, you can help us here. Maybe a different consulting firm can help us with our cost optimization, a different consulting firm can help us with our ERP and our SAP implementation and our tech stack. So it's very important that we do what we do really well and we continue to build that competitive moat, right? So for those of you who are keeping track of how many consulting buzzwords I've used, I'm probably at number 10 now with the competitive moat one.
So that is actually really the objective, is to get deeper, to get better at what we do, and not try to be all things to everybody because we believe that a one-size-fits-all is a one-size-fits-none.
Abi: Yeah, absolutely. And Shikha, it was interesting. While I was in my business school program, I took a pricing class and the most insightful session I found was when my professor actually invited a couple of consultants from Simon-Kucher to talk about real-world pricing strategies. And so I learned a ton of very tactical advice that I've been using, and I've been implementing when I'm building my own business.
Shikha: There are some downsides, Abi. The downside of being a pricing consultant in consumer is that you cannot go to a restaurant, you cannot go to the grocery store. You can't do anything without thinking about what the implications are of this price point, and they could have done it better, and why did they do it like this, and this is a bad promotion. So it's hard for me to live my daily life because I'm constantly evaluating business decisions.
Abi: Yeah, you can't unsee it.
Shikha: Can't unsee it.
AI in Consumer Retail – Real Impact vs. Overhyped
Abi: All right, now let's talk about AI. That's the talk of town. So every consulting firm, the whole world is talking about AI. So can you share where are you seeing real commercial impact from AI in consumer retail? And where do you think the market is getting a little ahead of itself? Shikha, this is a huge question.
Shikha: So Abi, can you help me contextualize when you say, are we talking about how consulting firms are helping clients with their AI strategy? Or is it what businesses are using AI for that's more go-to-market facing versus for internal use? Like there's, we could talk a lot and take this in many different directions. Can you ground me a bit in what I should focus on?
Abi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, AI is impacting everything from the kind of client work you're selling to how you're running your own day-to-day as consultants. Why don't we start with the kind of client work? So how are you helping your clients shape their strategy using AI?
Shikha: First of all, part of it is understanding what AI can do and can't do for them. And a lot of my clients immediately jump to, can we do AI pricing? It's like, well, hold up. You don't even have dynamic pricing or you don't even differentiate pricing. And so how are you even gonna talk about AI-driven pricing? Let's not leapfrog too far and fall off a cliff here.
But when it comes to AI right now, it's just figuring out what are some potential use cases that we could be employing AI for. A lot of times the more natural ones are for internal productivity, right? So things like labor management, which isn't exactly in our scope, but things like how do you use personalized promotions or how do you use AI for building out your customer data platforms and leveraging those better? So a lot more just better insight, right? Efficiencies and insights.
How can you use AI for analytics, right? So using chatbots to help you with, hey, what was my margin rate two months ago and what does it look like today for this SKU? How many units have I sold? So instead of having to go painstakingly into systems and getting reports, having that AI sit on top of your data tech stack and then just using it as an interactive tool, the way we use ChatGPT and Claude chatbots, is basically the number one use case.
Now, for more internal facing businesses to better operate — external facing, yeah, some of it I've mentioned. So things like how can we bring in more personalization into our CRM, into our outbound marketing? How can we think about creating next best offers, next best actions if someone isn't choosing to buy? How can we reignite a purchase, especially on D2C for abandoned cart? How can we think about cross-selling and building a basket, right? So a little bit more on the digital side and how do we make sure that our product pages and display pages and merchandising is optimal for search?
Less maybe for grocery and daily, but for more discretionary goods, people are now going to ChatGPT first. Is this like how Amazon at one point replaced Google for product search? I think that's now slowly gonna get replaced with ChatGPT or similar, where now we're gonna ask simple questions like, I have this event to go to, give me the best outfit for it and where can I find it and can it ship to me? How much is it gonna cost? This is my budget. So a lot of just being able to do multi-layered searching are some of the use cases that are coming up.
But I gotta be honest, I'm still myself figuring out AI. This landscape changes so fast. Every few weeks it's changing, so I'm just trying to keep up and keep my head above water for now.
Keith: Yeah, I mean I think similar. I'm not an expert on AI. I mean, that said, I think there's obviously AI impacts within both of our organizations, within our clients. I mean, they're both real impacts. They're both changing the way things are done within companies. And I think when I look at at least how we're using AI, it probably has a disproportionate impact on the life of junior consultants versus partners, where they can use it across tasks. I mean, data collection, formatting, summarizing things, all these individual tasks that used to take someone right out of school a day to do — now you can put it into ChatGPT or Claude and it can do it for you in a half hour or an hour. Some of the more premium programs I think start to be very powerful.
That said, I guess maybe two things where I think AI's impact might be limited, at least for the short to midterm. I mean, first of all, and it's I think pretty common sense, the clients, I mean, they want advice from a human. In a lot of cases, strategy work is major company defining decisions. And I don't think people — not to say that they won't be at some point — but at least right now, people are not comfortable getting that advice from a web portal, at least not yet. That's the first thing that has kind of minimized its impact at least overall.
The second thing is in terms of the decisions that are being made. So I mean most models from what I understand are fed with public or semi-public information. What they don't have access to is a private company's strategy, just because it doesn't exist out there in the world of things it can read and be fed. And you only really know those intricacies of a market or of a competitor's plan or strategy by spending time in the market and talking to people. So I think in summary, I mean, it's definitely changing the day-to-day of a job, particularly at the junior levels, but I don't think it's necessarily changing the value we bring to customers.
Abi: Absolutely. As the panelists have mentioned, consulting is a relationship driven business and we're serving human clients and so they're going to want to talk to other humans.
Shikha: Abi, I wanna just — it's really important. Actually, Keith, you spurred something in me. We've been having this existential debate a lot, right? Like the use of AI for productivity and especially for doing some client work, right? Internally for us at Simon-Kucher.
And the analogy for me is, okay, I'm gonna date myself, but back in middle school, I didn't really have the internet. So if I needed to do research, I went to the library and opened up an encyclopedia and ran around a library, right? That obviously wasn't a great use of my time. Because then the internet helped me have access to all the information in the world, right? So that to me is kind of an example of how libraries got disrupted. But I still had to do the thinking myself. If I just blatantly cited Wikipedia without checking the sources, without doing the homework myself, I wasn't gonna get a good grade in school on my paper.
And that's kind of how I think about AI in the consulting space as well, that it's very tempting to just let AI do the work for you and not really do the thinking yourself. I just said it's very bad to let the AI do the work for you and not do the thinking yourself. So if you outsource your work to AI, that's gonna really set you apart in a negative way, versus if you use AI to supercharge your recommendations.
And I actually think that temptation to just hand off AI work as a final work — first of all, we'll be able to actually differentiate a good consultant from a not-a-good consultant very quickly, because a good consultant will be able to defend and will use it to layer on and make themselves better and smarter, versus another consultant that's just outsourcing their work is actually gonna not be able to defend the work or have the insights, have not thought through the sources.
So to me, especially for younger folks that are going to become AI native very quickly, you know, in college right now and looking for a career in consulting, my unsolicited advice would be don't use it blindly or use it without really thinking through it. The acronym one of my colleagues came up with was be the CEO of your own work. So check, edit, own. You have to check, edit, and own your work, especially that's coming out of AI.
Abi: Yeah, thank you so much, Shikha.
What Private Equity Wants from Consultants Now
Abi: Next, I wanted to chat a bit more about private equity. I know Keith, earlier you brought an example with a private equity client. So we've noticed that private equity continues to drive a huge amount of activity across consumer and retail. But going back to this theme of change, what are investors looking for today that they weren't three years ago?
Keith: I mean, I've already spoken about the subject matter expert side of things, so I won't rehash that. And I think maybe I'll put my banker hat on a little bit and talk about bigger picture items. I think the first thing that they were looking for even more so than they were three or four years ago is quality. I mean, in some ways it's become a tale of two markets with quality assets being even more competitive than they were in the past.
I think part of the reason for that is that COVID vintage multiples are so high and people are trying to exit with multiples that are so high that it doesn't leave a lot of room for you to be wrong. And what that means for us is that for quality assets, the M&A process might be so competitive that we might be hired before there's even a live M&A process. On a poor quality asset, the process might not even get going, or maybe it goes directly into exclusivity with the one person who wants it, and we never even get to be engaged on it. So I think it's changing the type of engagements that we do and the type of assets that we see — that's the first thing.
The second change is in terms of the exit from investments. So I mean, obviously three, four, or five years ago, exit was something that people thought about. It's not a new topic. But I do think what has changed is there used to be a greater level of optimism that it's fine, we'll figure out who the buyer for this is when we go to exit four or five years from now. I think people are, given how many busted processes there have been over the last year or two, I think people are putting more thought into that before they even get into a company.
To the point where, I mean, our due diligence projects at this point, in some cases, will include a module that is basically brainstorming who could be a potential buyer five years from now if you're able to achieve your value creation plan. And they'll include parts of the scope that involve going out and talking to those buyers and asking their head of M&A, what do you think of a business that looks like this versus a business that looks like this? So I think people are putting in the work ahead of time to make sure that they're not left holding an asset five years from now that there isn't a buyer for, which there are a lot of people going through right now.
Shikha: Keith, can I ask a question? Asking for a friend, of course, but when you say COVID vintage multiples, what do you mean? Can you explain that?
Keith: Yeah, so I mean, end of 2020, 2021, I mean, the market was so hot and people were willing to pay such high prices that a lot of people own companies at a very high price and they're trying to exit them at a very high price. For the new buyers, that means much less margin for error in terms of your plan because you are paying a high price for it, so it has to go correctly for a lot of people's investments.
The Hardest Decisions Consumer Leadership Teams Face Right Now
Abi: Gotcha. Thanks, Keith. I was wondering — many consumer companies are facing the same challenge right now. Earlier we had also talked about, now we have higher costs, very volatile demand, pressure on margins, et cetera. So what's the hardest decision leadership teams are wrestling with today?
Keith: Yeah, I mean I think everything you just mentioned is a big component of it, but I think you put it all together and there is, at least in my conversations, a sense of confusion on what is actually the most important thing to focus on. There's a lot of uncertainty that is causing people to question where their priorities should be. I mean, tariffs are on, tariffs are off. Even if they don't have an impact on your business, no one wants to buy a business where they could have an impact. People wonder, should they take the time to rework their supply chain, or is this something that will pass three years from now? In food and beverage, where I spend a lot of time, people are wondering, are the current interests and hot topics trends or just fads? For example, is high protein the new low calorie diet, or is it just an overreaction to GLP-1?
I think consumers and the world in general have changed a lot over the last five years and changed more quickly than they have in the past and businesses and brands are still dealing with the repercussions of trying to understand what is important and what is not. And they're getting hit from all sides at the same time. In some ways I think that's part of why what consultants do is important and why people value our role in the market and our advice — I mean, we're not in, or at least the type of consulting I do, we're not in the day-to-day of their business. We're able to take a step back, give perspective and be calm and help people understand what should be their priority and where they should be spending most of their time.
Abi: Thanks, Keith. Shikha, not sure if you heard the question, but we're wondering, consumer companies are facing a whole host of challenges, rising costs, volatile demand, pressure on margins. So what's the hardest decision that leadership teams are wrestling with today?
Shikha: Not so much the hardest decision, but more the number one objective is how do we continue to grow? Right. And I think Keith, you're kind of saying similar things, which is how do we grow when there's so many headwinds? How do we remain relevant? What is the right size for our business? Are we content with being mid-market? Do we have ambitions? When you get to the top, there's only one way to go sometimes. And so then how do we continue — and that's a lot of pressure, especially for the C-suite and boards for public companies as well.
And so how do we think about continuing to find areas or pockets of growth, innovation, thinking about the right talent so that we have teams that are focused on growth-oriented versus just business as usual? Because I think new ideas, fresh energy is very underrated in consumer retail, right? They are meant to be on top of not just trends, but they're also the ones creating the trends to a certain degree.
Rapid Fire: Overhyped vs. Underrated Trends
Abi: Great. Thank you so much. All right. Moving on, I wanted to go through a couple of what we call rapid fire questions. So welcome either of you to just jump in and give your quick answer. No thinking here, just want to hear your response. All right. What is one consumer retail trend that is overhyped?
Keith: I'd say Ozempic or other GLP-1 impact on consumer demand. I mean, all the studies point out that there should be a minus 10% or whatever it is influence on demand and I mean we just don't see it in the numbers. I think there's an impact, but maybe not to the same extent as people expected.
Shikha: Yeah. That's one of my two trends. The other one I think is thinking that AI is suddenly gonna change behavior completely, like shopping behavior and so on. I think people still wanna go to the store. We thought the internet was gonna mean no one wants to go to the store anymore. That's not true. People still wanna go to the store, they still wanna browse, touch, feel. It is an experience. So I think that would be my trend.
Abi: Absolutely, especially post COVID, we crave the in-person human connection. And what is one consumer retail trend that is underappreciated?
Shikha: For me, it would be personalization and experience, creating experiential environments. So personalization, I'm surprised by how much large retailers, consumer companies sit on trillions of rows of data. Why aren't they using it to cater to me better? They could do so much more on the growth side, from growing basket, from getting me to buy more, getting me to come more frequently, all those objectives.
And then the second is retailers have so much physical real estate. Why aren't they using it to create more experience? Right? And I think there are some companies that have done this really well. There's one in particular in the sporting goods space that's created store in store, you know, pop-ups. And this idea of, I want it to not just be, it's an event. It's like going to the movies. It's not just something I do because I have to fill my basket.
Keith: Say probably similar, the customization and the personalization side of things. I mean, we, as I said in the beginning, I do both the consumer side of things as well as the ingredient side of things. It's something that drives a huge amount of value, more upstream on the ingredient side of things and in the B2B world. And I think, well, it's certainly difficult to translate that into the B2C side of things. There are examples of people that have done it well and because of that have been very successful. So I would echo that.
Why Consumer & Retail Consulting Is Worth Your Career
Abi: Thank you both. Okay, I know we have just a couple minutes left, so I wanted to leave the audience with one last question from both of our panelists. So for someone who's considering a career in consumer and retail consulting, what makes this sector uniquely interesting right now?
Shikha: Just constantly changing, right? That's the fun part of it. It's the frustrating part, but also the fun part. And for me, the reason I've always loved consumer, I was an investment banker prior in property and casualty reinsurance, which made no sense to me. It's so abstract. I couldn't really, you know, but consumer, I can taste it, I can smell it, I can touch it, I can see it. And so the fact that it's tangible, the fact that I can leverage behavioral economics and consumer psychology. I mean, I'm not biased at all, but I objectively think consumer retail consulting is some of the best, and those businesses are some of the best ones to work for and work in.
Keith: Yeah, I mean I would have to agree. I mean, I think earlier you said it can drive you crazy and I have to agree, but at the same time on the flip side, it's also what's always made it interesting to me. I mean, the products that we deal with and the companies we deal with, they're in the world around you on a day-to-day basis. And I think it's fun to be able to walk through a grocery store and know about every product. It's even more fun to be able to remember that it's literally your job to try to eat the candy bar or whatever it is. So I think it can be very relatable and very real in a way that other parts of consulting just can't be.
Abi: Absolutely. Thank you both so much for your time.