As we move through 2025, cautious optimism surrounds the economy, but uncertainty about consumer behavior remains. While the consumer goods (CG) industry continues to grow steadily, sustaining it is increasingly complex amid shifting market dynamics and emerging challenges. Historically, 93% of companies have found it difficult to grow margins and drive growth at the same time, even in stable environments. Yet, most of the CG decision-makers remain focused on achieving both by 2025. To make this a reality, brands must be more agile than ever, ready to adapt quickly to an evolving consumer landscape.

Prepare Your Data for Generative AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to dominate the conversation, promising to transform every aspect of the CG business. However, AI’s potential is only as strong as the data it’s built on.

Across organizations, data sources are multiplying rapidly. From marketing and sales to customer service, different departments collect and store information in a fragmented manner. For AI to deliver real value, writing marketing copy in your brand voice, generating product descriptions that resonate, or creating relevant visuals, your data must be unified, accurate, bias-free, and secure.

It’s critical to integrate data across the organization into a single platform while ensuring customer information remains protected. Data cleanup is not a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing journey. Start collecting and organizing now, identify any gaps, and continuously evolve your data strategy to ensure you’re ready to power your AI initiatives.

Expert Advice: Don’t wait for your data to be perfect to begin. You can launch AI projects while continuing to refine and enhance your data ecosystem.

Use AI and Automation to Drive Hyper-Personalization

Personalization has become a cornerstone of consumer expectations. Today’s consumers want brands to recognize and respond to their unique needs and preferences. To meet these expectations, CG brands must deliver highly personalized sales and marketing experiences powered by AI and data.

For B2B customers, predictive analytics can enable brands to forecast demand more accurately, tailor pricing and quoting, and deliver account-specific insights to drive business growth.

Expert Advice: Ensure that the AI tools you choose safeguard your proprietary customer data. Look for solutions that protect privacy by masking data and eliminating the storage of sensitive information outside your systems.

Empower Guided Selling with Data and AI

Sales teams are increasingly expected to act as strategic advisors. But with fragmented systems and manual processes, reps often spend more time gathering information than engaging customers.

With unified data and AI tools in place, sales teams gain access to actionable insights, from sales forecasts to account planning support, all at their fingertips. AI can automate report generation, assist with business reviews, and help compare scenarios for smarter, faster decision-making.

Moving forward, sales teams will engage with their data through natural language queries, receiving real-time insights on promotions, inventory, and account performance. AI will help generate customized pitches and tailored sales plans, freeing reps from manual number-crunching and enabling more personalized customer interactions.

Expert Advice: Establishing a prompt library, a curated set of pre-approved templates and queries, can significantly improve consistency and speed across the sales organization. To take it a step further, solutions like Ivy Recommender can supercharge your efforts with intelligent, AI-driven sales guidance built for today’s fast-paced market.

Skill Up and Scale Up Contact Centers

Omnichannel service remains an untapped opportunity for many CG brands. Elevating customer service across all touchpoints can turn service interactions into revenue-driving moments. AI is instrumental in making this transformation possible by increasing operational efficiency and creating personalized customer experiences.

Start by equipping your service teams with chatbots like Ivy Chatbot and virtual assistants to handle routine inquiries. AI can also automate call summaries, generate action plans, craft follow-up emails, and suggest product recommendations, allowing human agents to focus on high-value interactions.

Field representatives, too, can benefit from AI-driven insights that predict service issues before they arise, helping to maintain strong customer relationships. A unified view of customer data ensures both agents and reps deliver a seamless, high-quality service experience.

Expert Advice: Connect service and sales teams on a shared data platform to drive consistent, omnichannel customer engagement, whether in-store, online, or at the call center.

A Roadmap to Profitable Growth

For consumer goods brands, profitable growth in 2025 will hinge on the intelligent use of data, the ability to personalize at scale, and the adoption of AI and automation. Success will require identifying friction points across the business and applying the right technologies and strategies to unlock new opportunities. By preparing now, brands can build greater agility, relevance, and resilience for the year ahead and beyond. Ivy Mobility’s intelligent, AI-powered solutions are designed to help consumer goods companies optimize data, enhance personalization, and drive smarter sales execution. Discover how Ivy Mobility can equip your brand to navigate 2025 and beyond. Talk to our expert team today.