Edith Heroux

After fifteen years managing trade promotion strategy for a major beverage manufacturer, I thought I understood the game. Plan your promotions, negotiate with retailers, execute in-market, measure lift, repeat. Then our trade spend hit $180 million annually with only marginal improvements in market share growth, and I realized we were flying blind. We knew our promotional planning was broken, but we didn't know how to fix it—until we implemented an AI-driven approach that fundamentally changed how we allocate every dollar of trade spend. What I learned during that transformation taught me more about promotion effectiveness than the previous decade combined. The journey to AI-Driven Trade Promotion Optimization wasn't smooth, and the lessons we learned often came through painful trial and error. Looking back, the mistakes we made and the breakthroughs we achieved offer a roadmap for anyone in the beverage industry—or any CPG category—looking to transform their trade promotion R...

After fifteen years managing trade promotions for a multinational CPG brand, I've watched promotional strategies evolve from spreadsheet warfare to something far more sophisticated. The shift toward AI Trade Promotion Management wasn't just another technology upgrade—it represented a fundamental rethinking of how we approach trade spend, measure promotional effectiveness, and compete for shelf space in an increasingly crowded retail landscape. This article shares the lessons I learned the hard way, the mistakes that cost millions in wasted trade spend, and the insights that finally helped our team achieve consistent promotional ROI improvements. My journey with AI Trade Promotion Management began three years ago when our category management team faced a crisis. We'd just completed our annual trade promotion analysis, and the numbers were brutal: nearly 40% of our promotional events had destroyed value rather than created it. Our trade spend had ballooned to 18% of gross re...