Steven Soderlund is a ten-year practitioner of category management and has worked with brands like Church & Dwight Co. and American Greetings. He is currently an analytical consultant at HIVERY and a board advisor to Category Management Association, or CMA - a professional association with a mission to help shopper insights and category management professionals worldwide to win with shoppers by developing processes and standardized documents for the industry.

In this podcast, we will cover:

• How category management (Cat Man) practice has evolved from Cat Man 2.0 to now Cat Man 3.0, and what it means for category analysts, category management and shopper insight professionals;

• Impact of the growing channels such as e-commerce and omnichannel on decisions category managers have to make around assortment, and how customer decision tree (CDT)varies between categories, retailers and channels;

• Why in the pre-pandemic world the shoppers were relatively predictable but in the post-pandemic world it has changed and now requires a new approach;

• Today's predictive retail analytics are not working, what solution can retailers and CPG brands rely on and use to make effective assortment and category decisions?

• How do artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions like HIVERY Curate make a difference to assortment planning and category decisions?

• Should retailers and CPG brands be concerned about the accuracy of AI-driven assortment recommendations?

• How does applied artificial intelligence and machine learning actually make assortment predictions when it comes to such things as SKU innovation or new product development when data does not exist?

• Can artificial intelligence and machine learning understand economic concepts like assortment elasticity, cannibalization, incrementality and demand transference?