The Great RGM Reset: From Price-Led to Volume-Led in 2026

The three props under the price era, and why all three gave way

For three years, Revenue Growth Management (RGM) in most consumer-goods companies meant one thing in practice: take price, and take it again. It worked because three conditions held at once. None of them was a capability the industry built. They were circumstances it enjoyed.

The first was cost cover. When input, freight, and energy costs spiked, a list-price rise read as fair, to retailers and shoppers alike, because everyone could see the same headlines. That cover has largely gone as input costs have settled. A rise now reads as a choice, not a pass-through, and it has to be argued on its own merits.

The second was a passive trade. Retailers absorbed and forwarded a remarkable run of increases before they pushed back in earnest. Then they pushed hard. In January 2024 Carrefour pulled PepsiCo products, 7 Up, Doritos, Lay's, and Quaker among them, from its shelves across France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Poland, citing unacceptable price increases.¹ Around the same window, France made pack-shrinking a labelled act: from 1 July 2024 larger stores must flag on shelf when a pack has shrunk and the price per unit has risen.² The quiet moves stopped being quiet.

The third was a patient capital market. Investors rewarded the revenue line through the inflation years and asked few questions about where it came from. They ask now. The single most-quoted figure in the sector this year is Bain's: about three-quarters of 2024 sales growth is likely to have come from price rather than volume, healthier than 2023 when that figure was around 90%.³ Read it the other way and the message is plain. The market wants to see volume come back into the mix, and it is starting to mark down the companies that cannot show it.

Volume is a harder game, and the org is staffed for the easier one

Taking price is a decision a small team can make in a room. Winning volume in a flat category is a system, and most commercial organisations spent the last three years getting very good at the room and letting the system rust.

The pressure is real. United States store brands reached 23.2% of units sold in the first half of 2025, and in Europe private label climbed to 38.8% of value across the seventeen markets measured.⁵⁶ Three years of branded price rises handed the value shopper a reason to try the own-label tier, and many of them stayed. Some of that damage is self-inflicted in a specific way: Simon-Kucher describes brands that have "accidentally vacated key category price points entirely," pricing themselves out of the shelf positions that used to anchor their volume.⁷

The encouraging part is that the volume game is winnable. The top ten global brands grew 4.8% last year, edging past private label's 4.3%, which tells you that strong brands taking the volume problem seriously can still out-execute the cheaper option.⁴ The losers are not brands as a class. The losers are the brands still running the 2022 playbook into a market that has moved on.

Four moves that separate the movers from the defenders

The companies getting ahead of this are not waiting for the perfect plan. They are making four moves, and you can read which camp a company is in by how many it has actually started.

First, they rebuild the joint business plan into something real. Done well, a joint plan can deliver more than 10% of incremental profit-pool growth in a single year for both the brand and the retailer. Done as most are, it delivers little: only one in four creates value for both sides.⁹ The move is to bring a genuine shared-growth case to the table, not a margin demand dressed as a plan.

Second, they fix the pack-price architecture they let drift. That means reclaiming the vacated price points, rebuilding the entry pack that holds the value shopper, and making the trade-up ladder make sense again. It is unglamorous shelf work, and it is where a lot of the recoverable volume sits.

Third, they put promotion money where it does work. More than half of all trade promotions deliver little or no sales lift, which is to say a large share of the single biggest line in the trade budget is spent renting volume that would have arrived anyway.⁸ Reallocating even part of that toward base demand is one of the fastest volume levers available.

Fourth, they innovate into new demand spaces rather than defending old ones. Nestle's Vital Pursuit, a frozen range built for users of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, went to shelves nationwide through Walmart, Target, and Kroger in September 2024 at a suggested price of $4.99 and under, after being announced that May.¹⁰¹¹ Whatever its eventual sales, it is the right shape of move: a new occasion, a new shopper, volume that does not have to be bought back from a competitor. Portfolio reshaping is the same instinct at the top level. Unilever grew underlying sales 3.0% in the first quarter of 2025 with its Power Brands also up 3.0%, and by December had separated its ice cream business into the standalone Magnum Ice Cream Company.¹²¹³ Focus the portfolio, then grow what is left on volume.

What the AI layer needs before it earns its keep

Every one of these moves now comes with a software pitch attached, and the spend is not small. Coca-Cola committed $1.1 billion over five years to the Microsoft Cloud and its generative-AI capabilities.¹⁴ Reckitt built an AI-enabled RGM programme with McKinsey, RGMx, and has been rolling it out across its markets since 2021.¹⁵ The consultancies have followed the money: BCG's revenue-growth-management platform was named in the industry's 2025 vendor panorama.¹⁶

The trap is buying the tool before the foundation is ready. Artificial intelligence applied to fragmented, inconsistent commercial data does not produce insight, it produces confident noise faster. The companies that get a return run a different sequence, and it comes down to four things: data harmonised across markets and customers so the model sees one truth, clear decision rights so a recommendation has someone empowered to act on it, a measurement spine that can tell incremental from borrowed volume, and people trained to use the output rather than admire it. Get those right and the platform compounds. Skip them and it becomes the most expensive dashboard in the building.

What a credible reset looks like from the outside

You can spot a company that has actually started from one that is talking about starting. The one that has started can show you a harmonised data layer before it shows you a tool. It can name the price points it has reclaimed and the promotions it has cut. It has a joint plan its biggest customer would recognise as a growth case rather than a margin grab. And it talks about volume in specifics, by pack, by occasion, by shopper, rather than as a line item it hopes will recover.

The reset is not a strategy memo. It is a multi-year infrastructure project that happens to be dressed in commercial language. The price era flattered a lot of organisations that never built the volume machine underneath. The next few years will show which of them are building it now, and which are buying software and hoping it counts as the same thing. It does not.

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