3-2-1: Winning Retailers, Creating Demand, and Leading the Category

3-2-1: Welcome to 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question to help you push boundaries, move the needle with retail partners, and lead your category. We know 2025’s been tough for the CPG world. But let’s keep showing up, doing the work, and focusing on what we can control. 3...

3-2-1 on Sharpening Top-to-Tops, Leading Category Conversations, and more

3 Insights Worth Your Attention I. How to Pressure-Test Your Story to Turn Top-to-Tops into Real Conversations A strong Top-to-Top or JBP story isn’t just about what you want to say. It’s about anticipating how the conversation might go. The best teams don’t just align on strategy and messaging. They...

Lessons from CAGNY 2025 (Investor Conference): A Playbook for Navigating Uncertainty in 2026

In early 2025, various news outlets reported that The Hershey Company was preparing for record-high cocoa prices and potential tariff pressures that would significantly impact profitability. The Context: Facing Market Uncertainty Then-CEO Michele Buck acknowledged the impact of rising cocoa prices, stating, “We expect the surge in cocoa prices to...

How to Stay on a Fund Manager’s Radar

“You wouldn’t believe how many meetings I sit through where, by the end, I still have no idea what the company is trying to say.” That’s Sid Chand Lall, a fund manager at Marlborough Group (a UK-based investment management firm) overseeing $15 billion in assets, speaking on the Enquire podcast (a great listen for top IR...

Is Your CEO Robbing Impact from Your Investor Message?

There’s an unspoken reality in Investor Relations: No matter how well you craft the investor narrative, your CEO has the final say. And sometimes, their delivery robs the message of its impact. It’s a tough spot. Your job as an IRO is to ensure that investors walk away with a...

Why Brands Need to Embrace a Fanatical Purpose

Read, react, and discuss on LinkedIn! At the CMA Conference hosted by Category Management Association, Doug Stephens, founder of Retail Prophet and a leading expert on the future of retail, shared a powerful message: Traditional ways of competing in retail are dead. Competing on selection, convenience, pricing, or product? That’s...

Getting Better Answers from AI: A Smarter Approach for CatMan Teams

One of the most practical takeaways from the CMA 2025 Conference came from Colin Ching and Liliya Babraunichaya at Microsoft (big thanks to them!). They shared a simple yet powerful way to get better results from AI—one that I immediately started using. It’s called the GCSE Framework, a structured approach...

A Call To Rebrand IRO to Chief Strategic Investor Engagement Officer

By Mark Hayes Business functions are judged not just by their outcomes but by their strategic impact on a company’s growth, sustainability, and competitiveness and branding matters. The demands on the Investor Relations Officer (IRO) market have evolved, so too has the role of the Investor Relations Officer (IRO). The...

How Armstrong Sharpened Its Investor Narrative

The Opportunity Armstrong’s Investor Overview Presentation had evolved through incremental updates. It was current, but the story had become less cohesive. Like many IROs, their team found that each revision chipped away at the structure, making the narrative harder to follow. The company’s stock had been performing well, and investor...

How to Create a Killer Story for Your Top-to-Top Meeting with Retailers

Top-to-top meetings with retailers are high-stakes. You have a limited window to align on a joint strategy, build credibility, and secure buy-in. And yet, so many of these meetings turn into a sales pitch disguised as a strategy discussion. Retailers don’t want a product catalog. They want a story—one that...

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