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B2B Collaboration in China FMCG: Forces Shaping Change

jsargent@advantagegroup.com (Justin Sargent) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:55:55 GMT

China’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market is at an inflection point. Operationally, it’s one of the most advanced and efficient retail ecosystems in the world, defined by strong execution, scale, and digital maturity. Yet as the market evolves, new pressures are emerging—not rooted in capability, but in how the system itself is functioning. Retailers and suppliers are not struggling to perform; they are navigating an environment where alignment is becoming harder to sustain, reshaping how value is created for customers and shared between partners.

Many of the dynamics shaping this shift are not unique to China. Across markets, pricing intensity is increasing, competition is evolving, and innovation models are changing. In isolation, these dynamics are well understood; in many cases, they’re effectively managed.

What sets China apart is how these dynamics are converging: simultaneously, at speed, and within a highly digital, data-rich, and transparent retail environment. Faster feedback loops and greater visibility are amplifying the impact of commercial decisions, bringing areas of tension into sharper focus.

The result is not a breakdown in performance, but a system under increasing strain. Decisions that are rational in isolation can begin to pull in different directions when viewed collectively, creating friction where there should be coordination.

At the centre of this shift are three forces reshaping the system.

1. EDLP Is Reshaping the Economics of Collaboration

EDLP is no longer just a pricing strategy; it’s reshaping how value is created and shared across the retailer–supplier relationship. In China’s highly transparent, platform-driven environment, retailers are placing greater emphasis on stable, competitive pricing to meet rising expectations for value and consistency. This shift is redefining margin structures, often placing increased pressure on suppliers to fund that value while maintaining investment in growth.

For retailers, EDLP is a necessary response to a more price-sensitive and transparent market. For suppliers, this often translates into margin pressure without sufficient certainty of return. Where cost, volume, and efficiency are not aligned, EDLP can quickly move from a shared growth model to a source of tension, limiting flexibility, reducing investment capacity, and placing strain on long-term collaboration.

2. Private Label Is Redefining Control and Differentiation

Private label is no longer a secondary lever; it’s becoming a central component of retailer strategy. In China, where competition is intensifying and margin pressure continues to rise, retailers are accelerating private label to strengthen price perception, improve margins, and build more differentiated propositions. What was once concentrated in entry-level offerings is now expanding across the value spectrum, taking on a more strategic role within category development.

For retailers, private label provides greater influence over pricing, margin, and assortment, as well as the pace and direction of innovation. For suppliers, it introduces increased competition for space, relevance, and investment. Where the role of private label is not clearly defined, tension can emerge; not because of its growth, but because of how it is positioned relative to branded products. Without clear role definition, what should function as a complementary strategy can instead become a source of misalignment, thereby weakening collaboration and creating uncertainty around long-term category direction.

3. Innovation Is Moving Faster—But in Different Places

Innovation hasn’t slowed; it’s shifted. In China’s highly digital, data-rich, and transparent retail environment, suppliers are increasingly prioritizing online channels for product development and testing, drawn by faster cycles, lower risk, and richer, real-time feedback. This shift is changing not only where innovation happens, but how it is brought to market, with physical retail playing a different role—less as the starting point for new ideas and more as the environment where proven concepts are scaled.

For suppliers, digital channels offer speed, agility, and more immediate insight. For retailers, this shift can reduce visibility of innovation in-store, even as investment continues to grow elsewhere. The challenge is not a lack of innovation, but a lack of alignment in how it flows across channels. Without coordination, innovation can become fragmented, limiting impact, reducing differentiation, and constraining the ability to scale effectively across the market.

When Forces Interact, Alignment Matters Most

Individually, each of these forces is manageable. Together, they are reshaping how value is created, shared, and sustained across the retailer–supplier relationship. The challenge is not any one force in isolation, but how they interact—amplifying pressure, exposing misalignment, and creating friction across the system.

In China’s fast-moving, highly transparent retail environment, the ability to align across these dynamics is becoming a critical driver of performance. Retailers and suppliers that define clear roles, coordinate investment, and operate with shared objectives are better positioned to navigate complexity and unlock sustainable growth. Those that do not risk fragmentation—where decisions made in isolation weaken impact, limit differentiation, and erode long-term partnership value.

Understanding where alignment is strongest, and where it is breaking down, is the first step toward building more effective, resilient partnerships.

Access the full Advantage China Perspective report to explore complete findings and gain deeper insight into how these forces are reshaping collaboration—and how to align your organization for sustainable growth.

Path to Excellence: Driving Retailer-Supplier-Performance

mincles@advantagegroup.com (Matt Incles) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:55:20 GMT

Business-to-business (B2B) partnership excellence doesn’t emerge overnight. It’s not defined by a single initiative or moment of alignment. It’s shaped over time, through the way your organization operates in the partnership: how you plan, how you deliver, and how you respond when things don’t go as expected.

In most organizations, the difference between an average partner and an exceptional one isn’t intent, it’s consistency. It’s the small, everyday behaviours that determine how easy you are to work with.

You see that consistency become visible in familiar ways: how strategy is aligned, how execution is delivered, how commercial performance is managed, and how consistently teams work together across the business every day.

These moments, often small, sometimes critical, collectively shape the experience of working with you as a business partner.

Understanding Your Path to Excellence

The Path to Excellence provides a way to understand how your organization’s behaviour shapes partnership performance over time.

Rather than capturing performance at a single moment, the Path to Excellence focuses on how progress builds, or breaks down, through how your teams operate day to day: how issues are handled, how reliably you deliver on commitments, and how confidently you work with your business partners on what comes next.

“As consistency in how business partners operate strengthens, the dynamic begins to shift. What was once reactive becomes more reliable. Execution becomes more predictable, and over time, teams begin to anticipate what’s coming next rather than responding after the fact."

Matt Incles, Vice President, Research, Advantage Group International

These changes aren’t isolated to one part of the business relationship. They show up across four core areas: strategy and alignment, execution, commercial performance, and day-to-day ways of working. Each reflects progress differently, but together they reveal how consistently you operate as a partner.

This perspective is grounded in real-world behaviour; built on 14 core partnership competencies that Advantage has measured and observed across manufacturer–retailer relationships over time.

In practice, progress takes shape through three distinct patterns, moving from reacting to executing reliably, to collaborating proactively, each stage strengthening how you operate as a partner.

1. Reacting

At the early stages of B2B partnerships, you may find yourself operating in a reactive mode.

Your teams spend much of their time responding after issues arise: managing last-minute changes, navigating misalignment between strategy and execution, and addressing day-to-day disruptions.

At this stage, expectations may be unclear or applied inconsistently. Information arrives late, priorities shift frequently, and decisions are made under pressure. While effort is high, execution can feel fragmented and disconnected, with your teams and business partners operating in parallel rather than in full alignment.

Reacting can keep things moving in the short term, but it often comes at a cost: increased friction, limited visibility, and a persistent sense of being one step behind—without being truly aligned.

2. Executing

As business partnership build consistency, execution becomes more reliable.

Expectations are clearer, roles and accountabilities are better defined, and delivery becomes more predictable across teams.

Your operating routines begin to support progress rather than create friction. Information flows more consistently, commercial discussions are more grounded and transparent, and fewer issues escalate unexpectedly. Your teams spend less time course-correcting and more time delivering against agreed plans.

The partnership becomes steadier and more dependable. Your energy shifts away from constant problem-solving and toward performance, continuous improvement, and delivering on shared business objectives.

At this stage, the focus is on reliability, ensuring that commitments are consistently delivered and that the B2B partnership operates with discipline and follow-through.

3. Collaborating

At the most advanced stage of B2B engagement, you move beyond execution to proactive collaboration.

You anticipate what lies ahead, identify risks earlier, and adapt as conditions change before issues impact performance.

Consistency creates confidence and enables stronger forward planning. Strategy conversations happen earlier and with better alignment. Execution is guided by forward-looking insight, and commercial decisions reflect a clearer understanding of trade-offs and long-term impact. Your ways of working support open dialogue, trust, and shared ownership of outcomes.

The partnership becomes more resilient and efficient, shifting from reacting to issues to anticipating them, using insight and alignment to shape outcomes, not just manage performance.

Across each of these stages, the underlying driver remains the same. Progress along the Path to Excellence is shaped not by a single initiative or moment of alignment, but by sustained effort to strengthen partnership behaviours across strategy, execution, commercial performance, and ways of working.

Looking Ahead on the Path to Excellence

What ultimately differentiates strong business partners from the rest isn’t ambition. It’s consistency.

Not just in plans or processes, but in how your organization operates day after day across strategy, execution, commercial performance, and ways of working.

As these behaviours become more consistent, friction fades, clarity improves, and progress becomes easier to sustain. Most importantly, trust begins to build.

The Path to Excellence provides a practical a way to understand that progress. It shifts the focus away from static evaluation and toward continuous improvement; helping you see where consistency is building, where it’s breaking down, and what it will take to move forward.

In an increasingly complex retail environment, that perspective matters. When your organization strengthens how it operates as a business partner, you are in a better positioned to anticipate change, reduce inefficiencies, and drive sustained performance.

Ready to understand how you engage as a partner? Your Advantage Advisor can help.

LiveLens Transform: Faster, More Aligned Decision-Making

aabdulla@advantagegroup.com (Anthony Abdulla) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:54:53 GMT

Insight is only the starting point. Alignment determines what happens next.

After results are shared, the pattern is familiar. Conversations loop back. Interpretations differ. Priorities compete. Actions are identified and then stall before real momentum builds.

The insight is clear. The path forward requires alignment.

For global suppliers and retailers managing complex B2B relationships across markets and functions, this gap carries a real cost. Not just in time, but in confidence. When teams interpret the same insight differently, progress slows, and decisions lose momentum before they take hold.

The Questions That Slow Decisions Down

Most reporting provides a clear view of performance: where things stand and how they’ve changed.

But the questions that create real friction are harder to answer:

Which feedback should we act on now?
What are top performing partners doing differently, and can we replicate it?
If we invest here, what changes, and what doesn’t?
Are we aligned enough to commit resources?

These questions sit between the report and the decision, and in large, distributed organizations, they are often answered inconsistently, or not at all.

This is where momentum slows. As a result, teams revisit the same questions repeatedly, across markets, functions, and cycles.

The Shift That Changes Everything

One pattern comes up consistently in conversations with supplier and retail leaders: they don’t need more information. They need shared agreement that something is worth acting on, and the confidence to move quickly once it is.

This is not a data access problem.
It’s an alignment problem. A confidence problem. And often, a gap between insight and how it connects to priorities, trade-offs, and outcomes.

The insight may be available, but until it is clearly connected to strategic priorities, it doesn’t fully land with decision-makers.

When those gaps close, momentum follows. Teams spend less time interpreting and more time executing. Decisions are made with clearer ownership and stronger evidence. Action becomes a natural continuation of insight, not a separate step.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The most effective organizations have changed how they work with insight: not as a periodic report to review, but as a continuous capability that supports decisions as they happen.

In practice, that means:

Reducing the manual effort required to identify signal in large volumes of feedback, so leaders aren’t reading hundreds of comments to understand what matters.
Benchmarking performance against what top‑performing business partners do define what “improvement” looks like.
Modeling the potential impact of decision before committing time or budget.
Converting insight into clear, aligned actions with defined ownership and timelines.

In other words, insight doesn’t stop at visibility. It drives execution.

Where Advantage LiveLens Transform Fits

Advantage LiveLens Transform is built for the moment where insight alone is not enough – when teams need to decide what to do next.

It brings structure and clarity by helping teams understand what drives performance, compare priorities to top-performing partners, and explore potential outcomes before committing resources.

Going beyond interpretation, LiveLens Transform connects insight to decision, providing direction teams can align around, in the language leadership uses to set priorities, evaluate trade-offs, and act with confidence.

The result is faster alignment, clearer direction, and greater confidence in what comes next.

Insight Is Only the Starting Point

The standard for performance intelligence is shifting.

The organizations pulling ahead aren’t just measuring more effectively. They’re deciding faster, aligning earlier, and executing with greater confidence.

Because insight only matters when it leads to decisions teams can act on.

See how this comes to life in practice: explore the LiveLens Transform demo or connect with an Advantage Advisor.

Continuous Insight: The Evolution of B2B Engagement

AGI Media Team — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:30:00 GMT

As organizations explore more continuous approaches to insight to support day-to-day and strategic decision-making, what matters more than simply having access to information, is ensuring it is genuinely useful over time. When insight is built with continuity and context, it becomes more than a collection of data points; it becomes something teams can return to, build on, and act on with confidence.

Increasingly, organizations are looking for ways to engage with feedback as it evolves. Not simply to understand performance in hindsight, but to inform decisions as relationships and priorities shift. Importantly, this doesn’t mean collecting more feedback, more frequently; it means building continuity, context, and relevance between formal decision points.

In the conversation that follows, Matt Incles, Vice President, Research at Advantage, shares his perspective on how insight is evolving, how continuous approaches can complement trusted annual benchmarks, and what this shift means for decision-making throughout the year.

In the clip below, Matt reflects on how insight is evolving — and why continuity and context matter.

Q) How are the information and insight needs of retailers and manufacturers evolving?

One of the most visible shifts is the pace at which data now needs to flow; both between businesses and within them. That acceleration isn’t limited to research; it applies to all forms of information. As a result, insight has to keep pace, delivering feedback in time for organizations to act while it still matters.

The second shift is complexity. Businesses today operate within far more interconnected networks, which naturally leads to more complex data. That has important implications for how insight is gathered, interpreted, and shared. As operating models continue to evolve, the way we support our clients with data and insight needs to evolve alongside them.

Q) At what point does it become clear that these changes call for a more continuous, Always-On approach?

The Advantage benchmark has long been a powerful tool, giving clients a clear, once-per-year view of how they are performing relative to their peers. It remains an important strategic reference point. At the same time, it has become clear that there is significant opportunity to deliver more value throughout the year. Advantage can play a broader role as an independent, objective voice by gathering feedback and sharing insight on a continuous basis in a way that better supports decision-making. As our clients’ businesses continue to evolve, it’s only natural that the way we support them evolves alongside them.

Q) What do organizations often misunderstand about Always-On or continuous insight?

One common misunderstanding is that always-on insight simply means running more surveys more frequently. In reality, it represents a shift from episodic research to a continuous conversation. It’s about building memory into the data; understanding what was said previously and using that context as the starting point to explore what has changed, and why. That ongoing dialogue makes it possible to track the natural ebbs and flows of business relationships over time, rather than resetting the conversation once a year.

Q) Where does continuous insight add the most value between formal reporting cycles, and how can teams decide what to focus on as more feedback becomes available?

One of the most important benefits of continuous insight is the ability to respond to feedback when it is most relevant. When insight is shared around a meaningful moment, such as a joint business plan or another key interaction, teams can address issues early, before they escalate.

Relevance also makes insight more actionable. By linking feedback to a specific partner, team, or business moment, it becomes much easier to understand what matters most and why. Rather than relying on high-level observations, teams can see how perceptions are evolving over time and connect that insight to what’s happening in the business. Sharing feedback with the right people at the right time helps teams not only act more effectively, but act in the right way — focusing on the most relevant issues with the partners where it matters most.

Q) As insight becomes more continuous, how do teams decide what to focus on?

Actionability comes from relevance. When insight is clearly linked to a specific partner, team, or business moment, it becomes much easier to translate feedback into action. Rather than relying on high-level input that can be difficult to interpret, continuous insight helps teams see how perceptions are evolving and connect that feedback to what’s happening in the business. Sharing that insight with the right teams supports more effective responses — not simply faster ones, but more informed and targeted decisions.

Q) How does Advantage LiveLens help teams turn continuous insight into clear direction?

Advantage LiveLens reflects how Advantage is evolving the way insight is accessed and shared. It provides clients with a clear, intuitive way to engage with their data and insight when they need it — to learn from best-in-class performance and to share insight internally in a way that supports action.

Always available and designed for ease of use, LiveLens offers a more agile experience than has been possible in the past. It acts as a delivery layer that puts insight directly into clients’ hands, helping teams understand what the feedback means and apply it with confidence.

Q) How does the annual Advantage Report fit into an Always-on insight model?

Our Advantage Report benchmark remains a cornerstone of our approach. It continues to serve as a trusted, industry-wide reference point and an essential way for organizations to take stock.

What’s evolving is how that benchmark is complemented throughout the year. Rather than waiting for a single annual moment to understand how performance is changing, continuous insight allows feedback to be shared on an ongoing basis. The annual benchmark still provides the robust analysis, rankings, and broader context that clients rely on, while continuous insight adds continuity between reporting cycles. Together, the two approaches work in tandem — offering both a clear point of reference and a more complete view of performance over time.

Q) What core principles remain in place as Advantage evolves toward an Always-On model of continuous insight?

There are four fundamentals that remain unchanged.

First, we continue to engage with the right people; genuine industry participants who are directly involved in these relationships. Hearing from the most relevant voices has always been core to Advantage’s approach.

Second, our competency framework and measurement model remain firmly in place, providing a consistent, level playing field for benchmarking across the industry.

Third, we remain deeply rooted in the CPG and grocery retail sectors, evolving alongside the needs of the industry while staying grounded in its realities.

And finally, our people. Alongside the data and insight, we have knowledgeable, experienced teams around the world who help clients interpret feedback and turn it into meaningful action.

Q) What mindset shift do you hope organizations make as they adopt an Always-On model?

I would like clients to think about Advantage as a year-round partner. A place they can turn to for insight, understanding, and perspective whenever it’s needed.

That means using feedback to understand how partners experience the relationship, learning from best-in-class performance, and feeling comfortable engaging beyond a single annual moment. Our intention is to help clients run their businesses more effectively throughout the year, embedding insight into how decisions are made, not just revisiting it once every twelve months.

Q) How will engagement change for those who currently participate annually in Advantage Report?

We’re strengthening our relationship with participants by being much more respectful of their time. Instead of a single, large annual survey, participation will involve smaller, simpler moments of feedback spread throughout the year, aligned to moments that matter most. In return, contributors will receive more insight back, sharing knowledge and learning as part of a fair exchange. For those who participate today, that means more value, more visibility, and a more continuous relationship with Advantage.

Q) How will client engagement with Advantage evolve as insight becomes more continuous?

Annual reviews led by the Advantage client service team remain an important milestone and will continue to play a central role. They provide a structured moment to reflect on performance, align on priorities, and take stock. What’s evolving is what happens between those annual reviews. Insight-led conversations will take place more frequently throughout the year — sometimes in smaller or more informal ways, but still highly impactful. Over time, this supports a stronger partnership and enables clients to work with Advantage as a consistent source of insight for continuous business improvement.

From Insight to Continuous Impact

As organizations continue to navigate greater complexity and faster decision cycles, the way insight is gathered and used is evolving. The move toward more continuous approaches reflects a shift in mindset, from viewing insight as a periodic output to treating it as an ongoing input into better decision-making.

This evolution isn’t about replacing what has worked well in the past. Trusted benchmarks, established frameworks, and expert guidance remain essential. What’s changing is the ability to build on that foundation, maintaining continuity between formal moments of review and creating greater relevance as priorities and relationships shift.

Ultimately, continuous insight allows organizations to stay closer to what matters most, using feedback not just to reflect on performance, but to guide progress over time. Advantage LiveLens supports a more connected, confident way of working — and one that positions insight as a living part of how organizations learn, adapt, and grow.

To explore how a more continuous approach to insight can support decision-making in your organization, speak with an Advantage advisor.

The Consistency Advantage: Driving Trust & Growth

AGI Media Team — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:30:00 GMT

Across every market we serve, one quality continues to set high-performing retailers and suppliers apart: consistency. In a fast-shifting business landscape, predictable performance has become a defining advantage: one that builds trust, strengthens collaboration, and drives sustained growth.

Consistency is not sameness, it is coherence: the ability to deliver on promises and perform dependably as conditions change. The most successful companies institutionalize reliability through aligned leadership, shared accountability, and disciplined communication.

Drawing on Advantage Group’s 2024 and 2025 global B2B data, The Consistency Advantage shows that organizations that deliver reliably, within and across markets, earn higher levels of trust and achieve stronger overall performance.

Below is a high-level look at what the data reveals, and why consistent performance is emerging as a critical competitive advantage.

1. Why Consistency Has Become the New Measure of Credibility

In today’s fast-moving business environment, consistency has become a core marker of credibility and trust. Organizations that deliver predictably — across teams, cycles, and markets — earn deeper confidence from their partners and move faster as a result. Advantage Group’s global data shows that companies that communicate clearly, meet commitments, and execute reliably outperform peers across trust, collaboration, and overall business outcomes.

It’s not the occasional win that earns credibility — it’s the ability to perform dependably over time. Trust isn’t built on occasional excellence. It’s built on consistency.

2. What Trusted Organizations Do Differently

Across thousands of Voice of Customer (VoC) insights, four behaviours consistently distinguish high-performing, highly trusted organizations:

Reliability: Delivering on promises with dependable execution.
Clarity: Setting expectations and communicating proactively.
Turning commitments into action, every time.
Alignment: Creating a coherent, predictable experience across teams and markets.

These behaviours reduce friction, accelerate decisions, and enable collaboration to scale. In contrast, even small inconsistencies create doubt, slow progress, and erode confidence. When consistency compounds, trust compounds — and where trust grows, performance follows.

3. Making Consistency Measurable — and Actionable

One of the most important findings in The Consistency Advantage is that consistency isn’t a perception, it’s a measurable signal of performance. Using two complementary lenses, within-market consistency and global consistency, the report evaluates how reliably organizations deliver on expectations and how that reliability translates into trust and commercial outcomes.

Across five key markets, China, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the U.S., and India, the pattern is unmistakable: higher consistency aligns with stronger trust and stronger performance.

4. Why Consistency Is Becoming the Next Competitive Advantage

Trust is one of the most valuable, and fragile, forms of capital in business. Advantage’s global research shows that consistency is the capability that fuels it. Leading organizations don’t just deliver results; they deliver them reliably, across quarters, across challenges, and across markets. When consistency becomes measurable and actionable, it strengthens partnerships, accelerates collaboration, and equips organizations to grow in any environment.

In a world defined by shifting expectations and constant change, consistent performance is becoming a critical source of long-term competitive advantage.

Unlock Your Consistency Advantage

Our full global report dives deeper into these insights, showing how leading organizations turn reliability into sustained trust, stronger partnerships, and measurable performance. Inside, you’ll find:

Market-level data across five regions
Insight into the trust–consistency–performance relationship
Real examples of how top companies institutionalize reliability
The behaviours and systems that turn consistency into competitive advantage

📊 Download The Consistency Advantage, our latest global report on how consistent performance drives trust, alignment, and growth.

The Collaboration Dividend: ROI on Strong Partnerships

AGI Media Team — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:15:00 GMT

Partnership has always been strategic. Now, it’s a measurable driver of performance.

The future of growth isn’t transactional. It’s collaborative. Across every category and market, leading suppliers are redefining performance, treating partnership as a shared pursuit of growth, not a cost of doing business. They’re building trust through transparency, aligning incentives, and making collaboration a measurable driver of value creation.

At Advantage, we call this the Collaboration Dividend: the compounding return unlocked when supplier–retailer relationships evolve from transactions to shared engines of growth.

Here’s how collaboration proves its value, and why it’s fast becoming a defining measure of business success.

1. Collaboration as a Measurable Growth Engine

The Collaboration Dividend isn’t theory. It’s proof that partnership pays back.

Drawing on data from 28 leading global suppliers, Advantage research found a clear, quantifiable link between the strength of supplier–retailer relationships and financial performance. Top-tier suppliers—those rated highest for collaboration and partnership quality in Advantage Report—show, on average, a 27% stronger overall financial profile than lower-tier companies.

This isn’t correlation. It’s cause and effect. Suppliers that operate in true partnership gain earlier visibility into demand shifts, reduce volatility across the value chain, and co-create innovations that drive category growth. Over time, these behaviours embed resilience and agility into their operations, generating compounding value that transactional models can’t replicate.

The evidence is clear: collaboration delivers measurable returns, revealing the scale of its impact.

2. How Measuring What Matters Reveals the Collaboration Dividend

If collaboration delivers measurable value, the next step is understanding how that value appears in performance.

To do this, Advantage built an evidence-based financial model linking relationship strength to business outcomes. The Collaboration Dividend is grounded in five core metrics:

Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) – long-term value creation and reinvestment capacity.
Operating Cash Flow Margin (OCF) – operational strength and reliability.
Unlevered Free Cash Flow Margin (UFCF) – sustainability after investment.
Revenue Growth – consistent market momentum driven by trust and collaboration.
Gross Profit Margin (GPM) – flexibility to reinvest in shared growth and innovation.

Together, these metrics reveal how effective collaboration enhances business fundamentals, not just perception. The Collaboration Dividend Scorecard goes beyond sales or volume to capture the compound effect of partnership: how trust, resilience, and aligned incentives create performance that outpaces transactional models.

3. Why Collaboration Is Becoming the New Measure of Success

Today’s business environment is defined by volatility, transparency, and rising expectations. Retailers and suppliers must do more with less, move faster, and prove the value of their every decision. Collaboration is no longer a soft skill. It’s a strategic advantage with measurable financial impact.

The Collaboration Dividend marks a turning point in how partnership is understood and valued. It moves collaboration from perception to performance, linking relationship strength directly to tangible business outcomes. When suppliers and retailers share data, align incentives, and build mutual resilience, they don’t just withstand disruption, they turn it into opportunity.

This isn’t about adding another metric. It’s about redefining success—and proving that partnership health and business performance are closely linked.

4. Turning Continuous Insight into a Competitive Edge through Collaboration

In today’s fast-moving marketplace, annual reviews of business performance are no longer enough. Success now demands continuous measurement. Markets shift daily, consumer behaviour changes overnight, and supply chains are tested in real time. Partnership strength must be tracked with the same speed and precision as the decisions it informs.

That’s why Advantage is evolving toward an Always-On model—transforming periodic measurement into continuous partnership intelligence. The Collaboration Dividend becomes more than a single data point; it is a living indicator of how collaboration compounds across teams, cycles, and decisions.

For suppliers, this means real-time visibility into how partnership behaviours—like joint planning, data sharing, and aligned execution—translate directly into business results. For retailers, it means identifying partners who bring agility, resilience, and shared growth potential to every interaction.

When collaboration is measured continuously, improvement becomes continuous too. The result is a business ecosystem that doesn’t just measure performance—it continuously strengthens it.

5. The Future of Growth: Realizing Your Return on Partnership

The Collaboration Dividend redefines how value is created. It proves that the strongest relationships don’t just support performance—they shape it. Turning collaboration into a measurable driver of growth shows that partnership strength isn’t a by-product of success but a catalyst for it.

As Advantage evolves toward a continuous-insight model, this finding stands as both proof and promise: when partnership is measured in real time, its value multiplies over time. Collaboration shifts from a cost of doing business to a measurable source of advantage—a true Return on Partnership. In the business of the future, that may be the most valuable return of all.

Ready to explore what your Collaboration Dividend could be? Contact your Advantage Engagement Advisor to start quantifying your Return on Partnership.

Why Always-On Insight Matters for 2026 and Beyond

AGI Media Team — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:00:00 GMT

For more than 35 years, Advantage has helped retailers and suppliers strengthen collaboration, elevate performance, and drive growth through trusted business-to-business (B2B) relationship insight. That foundation remains unchanged. What is changing is how we deliver that insight.

Business now moves faster than ever. Conversations unfold daily, not quarterly. Decisions must be made with speed, confidence and clarity. To meet this new pace of business, Advantage is evolving how insight is delivered. Launching in 2026, Advantage LiveLens will introduce an Always-On, real-time insight experience—powered by continuous feedback loops, connected data, and human-centered design—giving teams a dynamic, living view of partnership performance.

With Advantage LiveLens bringing this new model to life, here’s how Always-On insight creates a faster, clearer, and more connected understanding of partnership performance:

1. Continuous Insight for a Faster World

Our Always-On model moves beyond periodic, one-size-fits-all Advantage Report surveys, and replaces them with short, contextual conversations that happen when they matter most, for example: after key meetings, reviews, launches, or other meaningful interactions.

Looking ahead, each touchpoint will build on the last, creating a continuously refreshed view of partnership performance throughout the year. With Advantage LiveLens supporting this model, real-time insight will become easier to access, interpret, and act on, helping teams stay aligned, informed, and responsive as conditions change.

2. Designed Around Real Contributors

Insight can only be as strong as the voices behind it. In an Always-On model, contributors are engaged at the right moments, when context is fresh, relevant, and meaningful.

This experience respects contributors’ time and expertise by focusing on natural, relevant, and engaging interactions when collecting business partner feedback. Contributors clearly see how their input drives improvement, which deepens trust and encourages authentic participation. When feedback feels meaningful and connected to real business outcomes, everyone benefits.

3. From Data to Direction with Advantage LiveLens

Advantage LiveLens, our new client delivery portal, brings an Always-On research model to life. It gives supplier and retailer clients, as well as Advantage Advisors, a central location to access, understand, and act on continuous insight. By connecting results, recommendations, and readiness, Advantage LiveLens offers a single, living view of performance. With AI-assisted summaries and intuitive dashboards, it helps teams move from data to direction faster and with greater confidence.

4. The Same Trust, Now Working Harder

This evolution doesn’t replace what clients already rely on from business partner engagement; it builds on it.

Advantage LiveLens is anchored in the same trusted Advantage Report benchmark, now enhanced by continuous signals that make insight more dynamic and actionable than ever. The rigor, credibility, and partnership that define Advantage remain unchanged. What’s new is the added speed, visibility, and context that empower clients to make stronger decisions every day.

5. Shaping the Future of Collaboration

Evolving Advantage represents more than a product update. It’s a mindset shift. We’re moving from static reports to living insight. From measurement to momentum. From data to dialogue.

As we look ahead to 2026 and beyond, our focus is simple: to make insight easier to access, understand, and apply so every decision is informed, every relationship is stronger, and every action moves you forward.

Watch the full webinar: Evolving Advantage: Same trusted benchmark. New improved insights.

Ready to explore what Always-On insight means for your business? Connect with us to discuss how Advantage LiveLens and continuous insight can support your goals for 2026 and beyond.

Elevating Research and Insight Excellence in 2026

AGI Media Team — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:45:00 GMT

Rooted in the belief that stronger partnerships create stronger businesses, Advantage has long helped organizations turn feedback into actionable insight that strengthens relationships and drives performance. That same purpose continues to guide our work as we head into 2026, a pivotal year shaped by client feedback, real user testing, and best-in-class research principles. These advancements also form the foundation for a more continuous, connected approach to insight delivery.

We’re redefining how insight is delivered, moving beyond periodic measurement to provide deeper understanding, greater relevance, and the foresight businesses need to make confident decisions. Serving as the foundation for Advantage’s next phase of evolution, 2026 marks a major step in how we deliver clearer, richer, and more actionable insights that strengthen the link between performance, perception, and progress.

Discover five ways Advantage is elevating research excellence and redefining insights delivery in 2026 for clients and contributors.

1. Reinforcement of What Great Looks Like

In 2026, best-in-class interviews will provide a sharper, evidence-based view of what leading business partners do differently, offering clear examples of excellence in action. By combining direct partner perspectives with proven examples of top performance, we’re turning excellence into something clients can learn from, apply, and replicate. These insights connect performance to practice, helping teams see what greatness is and how to reach it.

2. Deeper Executive Perspective

Understanding what drives stronger partnerships takes more than benchmarking. It calls for leadership context. Because clients consistently emphasized the value of strategic alignment and decision-making insight, our expanded business-leader interviews will bring deeper insight into the decisions, priorities, and alignment that enable stronger, more sustainable partnerships. By linking strategic decisions with in-market performance, we’re helping clients see how leadership actions shape results and drive success over time.

3. A User-first Survey Experience

Authentic insights start with authentic feedback. We’re redesigning the survey experience to make participation easier and more intuitive by introducing clearer question structures and flexible response options such as voice-to-text. These improvements help contributors respond naturally and consistently, capturing richer perspectives and stronger signals that lead to higher-quality data and greater confidence in the insights that follow.

4. More Relevance to How Your Business Operates

Every business operates differently—and insights should reflect that. Our redesigned framework, shaped through close collaboration with clients and market teams, aligns competencies by business area, connecting insights to the right teams and decision-makers faster. This analysis maps more intuitively to how your business works, making it easier to assign ownership, drive accountability, and turn insight into focused action.

5. Insight That Points to a Next Step

Feedback should do more than measure perception, it should guide progress. To deepen the value of every response, a new end-of-survey feature invites contributors to identify one action their partner should take to strengthen the relationship. This simple addition creates a meaningful shift: turning sentiment into direction. Rather than ending with data, you finish with a clear, actionable next step, grounded in your partners’ feedback and ready to shape future plans.

Evolving How We Deliver Insight

These enhancements represent a key step in Advantage’s evolution toward a more continuous, contextual, and connected research experience. Together, they lay the foundation for a future where data is dynamic, feedback is ongoing, and insights are delivered with greater precision and purpose.

Contact your Advantage Engagement Advisor to learn more about how these enhancements can support your planning for 2026.

Digital Excellence: Staying Ahead with Retailers

AGI Media Team — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:00:00 GMT

As retailers’ expectations continue to rise, suppliers face a critical challenge: keeping pace with what matters most. The good news? There’s a clear path forward—and it starts with understanding how retailers evaluate supplier performance.

What Retailers Really Value

Every year, we analyze the correlation between retailers’ ratings on individual competencies and suppliers’ Overall Performance scores within our annual syndicated research program, Advantage Report. This exercise helps us pinpoint which capabilities are most influential when retailers assess how well suppliers are engaging with them.

In the U.S. market, one trend has become unmistakably clear: digital and e-commerce competencies are no longer just “nice to have”—they’re essential. For the first time, three of the top five competencies most correlated with Overall Performance are in the digital space:

#2: Develops effective online content
#3: Drives online growth
#5: E-commerce integration

This shift reflects a broader transformation in how retailers operate and what they expect from their supplier partners. Digital fluency isn’t just about having a presence online; it’s about driving measurable growth, integrating seamlessly, and delivering content that converts.

The Growing Divide

Across our work with U.S. suppliers, we’ve seen significant investment in digital capabilities. But investment alone doesn’t guarantee results. Retailer feedback reveals a growing divide: while some suppliers are recognized as top performers, others are struggling (or even falling behind) as the bar continues to rise.

This raises a critical question for underperforming suppliers: “What do we need to do differently?”

Turning Insights Into Action

This is where AGI comes in. Our approach goes beyond surface-level metrics. Using AI and advanced text analytics, we query masked data from top-performing suppliers to uncover what “great” looks like in the eyes of retailers. This allows us to identify the specific behaviors, strategies, and executional details that drive excellence in digital competencies.

With these insights, suppliers can move forward with clarity and confidence, knowing exactly where to focus and how to elevate their performance.

Insights That Scale Across Every Market and Competency

Digital is just the beginning. Whether you’re focused on e-commerce, supply chain, customer service—or any other area critical to performance—our solutions are built to deliver across every AGI market and every competency we measure.

Wherever you’re aiming to improve, we help you move with clarity, act with confidence, and accelerate results. Let’s unlock what’s next—together. Connect with an Engagement Advisor today.

Transformando el Sector de Bienes de Consumo en México

AGI Media Team — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:00:00 GMT

El evento Advantage Collaboration Meeting 2025 en México dejó claro que la colaboración se está consolidando como el motor más poderoso que está dando forma al futuro del sector de bienes de consumo del país.

Este encuentro anual funciona como un foro estratégico en el que fabricantes y minoristas se reúnen para intercambiar puntos de vista sobre cuatro temas clave para el mercado mexicano: la incertidumbre económica, la salud y el bienestar, la tecnología y la inteligencia artificial (IA), y la colaboración como motor de crecimiento.

En esta edición, el foro reunió a 160 líderes de la industria de bienes de consumo de rápido movimiento en México. Destacaron la participación de empresas como Farmacias Benavides, Walmart, Mondelez y Unilever, quienes compartieron sus perspectivas en el escenario, reafirmando la importancia estratégica del foro para el diálogo dentro del sector.

Miguel Ángel Calvo, Market Leader de México en Advantage, junto a los cuatro panelistas: VP de Walmart (categoría Higiene y Belleza), VP Comercial de Mondelēz México, CEO de Unilever México y CEO de Farmacias Benavides, durante el evento Advantage Collaboration Meeting 2025.

Cuatro ideas que están moldeando el mercado de bienes de consumo en México

Del diálogo entre líderes surgieron cuatro ideas clave, cada una señalando cómo las empresas deben evolucionar para mantenerse competitivas:

1. Navegar la incertidumbre con el concepto VUCA
Peter Harris, CEO de Advantage Group International, presentó el marco VUCA – un entorno caracterizado por la volatilidad, la incertidumbre, la complejidad y la ambigüedad – y su relevancia en el mercado actual. Su mensaje fue claro: las empresas que prosperan son aquellas que planifican con agilidad, ejecutan con rapidez y anticipan los cambios en el comportamiento del consumidor antes de que ocurran.

2. Salud y bienestar impulsando la demanda del consumidor
La preferencia creciente por estilos de vida más saludables está transformando categorías completas. Los líderes coincidieron en que la innovación debe alinearse con las tendencias de salud y bienestar para mantenerse relevante y satisfacer las expectativas de los consumidores cada vez más conscientes de su bienestar.

3. La IA como facilitadora de la experiencia del consumidor
La digitalización y la inteligencia artificial dejaron de ser opcionales. Los panelistas señalaron que estas herramientas son indispensables para resolver desafíos complejos y, lo más importante, para ofrecer beneficios tangibles que mejoren la experiencia del consumidor.

4. Colaboración como ventaja competitiva
El consenso fue claro: la colaboración es el verdadero diferenciador. Al trabajar juntos, fabricantes y minoristas responden de manera más efectiva a los cambios constantes y construyen vínculos más sólidos y resilientes con los consumidoress.

Lo que los participantes valoraron más

Los asistentes destacaron la calidad de los panelistas y el valor único de reunir en un mismo escenario a algunos de los líderes más importantes del mercado mexicano. Reconocieron que encuentros de esta naturaleza son poco comunes y sumamente valiosos para intercambiar perspectivas, identificar tendencias y fortalecer relaciones estratégicas.

Mira los momentos destacados del evento:

Convertir la colaboración en crecimiento

Con más de 35 años de experiencia en evaluación de relaciones, Advantage transforma la colaboración en crecimiento tangible. El México Collaboration Meeting 2025 dejó claro que trabajar juntos es la verdadera ventaja competitiva.

Contacta hoy a tu Advantage Engagement Advisor para descubrir cómo la colaboración puede impulsar tu próximo paso hacia adelante.