5 signs your business needs a category strategy 🚩

I’ve worked in many businesses without a clear vision or strategy.

From the outside, everything looked fine. Everyone was busy working hard, but day to day it felt like guessing.

Nobody could say which opportunity mattered most, so everything got treated as equally important. We said yes to almost everything. The hardest part wasn't the workload, it was never being sure the work added up to anything.

A category strategy is simply a shared view of where category growth will come from, and the part your brands play in unlocking it. Without one, work still happens, it just pulls everyone in different directions.

Here are five signs it might be time to start creating a category strategy for your business.

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1. Your annual planning starts with the innovation pipeline

I see this all the time. The innovation arrives to your team fully formed, and then you have to go and find the insight that justifies it, post-rationalising what’s been handed down.

When you've got a clear category vision, the insight comes first and the innovation answers it. Everything is rooted in the shopper behaviour that grows the category. It’s a much easier sell and a more successful launch.

2. You reinvent your story for every retailer

Customising your story for retailer meetings is vital because it shows retailers that their needs are well understood and important to you.

However, starting from scratch for every customer meeting is not a good use of your time. It also means you end up telling them what you think they want to hear instead of truly challenging them in a collaborative way.

A clear category strategy already takes the retailer’s goals into account, so your ducks are in a row before you start preparing for the meeting.

Then the job is to tailor and tweak, making the story more relevant to that retailer rather than inventing a new one every time.

3. Your teams disagree about where growth will come from

I recently worked with a business where the brand team and the category team were prioritising different things.

The brand team were laser focused on frequency. Category frequency was declining, so their plan was to get existing shoppers to buy more often. Makes a lot of sense.

But frequency was declining because new shoppers kept arriving in the category, buying once. The number that looked like a problem was actually a sign of growth.

The category team saw the far bigger opportunity, keep pulling new shoppers in, rather than squeeze the ones already there.

Nobody was wrong. They just hadn't agreed where growth should come from, so they read the same number in opposite directions.

4. You have multiple brands and they are starting to compete with each other

When you have more than one brand in a category, each brand has its own plan, its own vision, its own strategy. Without a clear category growth strategy, none of those teams are talking to each other.

I've seen two brands from the same business launch near identical innovation at the same time, aimed at the same shopper. Instead of complementing each other, they cancelled each other out.

With one category strategy, each brand knows which part of it they own. They can still be ambitious but remain in harmony, so you're growing the category rather than competing with yourself.

5. You're entering a new market, channel or category

Without a strategy, you default to the playbook you already have. When it feels like the obvious thing to do or it worked last time.

But the shopper behaves differently here, the competitive landscape is different, the retail environment is different. The playbook that made you successful somewhere else rests on assumptions that don't hold here.

As a new player, you have to add something the category hasn't already got. Without a clear view of what that is, you end up duplicating brands that are already on shelf. No reason for the retailer to back you, no reason for the shopper to pick you up.

A clear category growth strategy means you go in knowing what you're adding to the category, not just what you're taking from it.

The takeaway

Remember the bit about never being sure the work adds up to anything? That's what a category strategy fixes.

Not by asking anyone to work harder, everyone's flat out already, but by giving your teams one goal and a clear view of how their day to day work gets you there.

If two or more of these felt a bit close to home, you're not alone, and it's very fixable.

We run workshops that help teams build a category strategy they'll actually use. If that sounds like something you need, get in touch to set up a call.

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September 2026