Data Literacy - Historical Promotional Data

I have a question for my peers in the CPG or Retail industries. How many of your organizations collect, maintain and use promotional data?

In CPG organizations, almost 30% of the volume can be attributed to promotions. In my experience as a product manager and practitioner, I did not come across a single organization that had the cadence to capture historical promotional data.

You are implementing a Machine Learning solution. The solution provider asks for promotional data, and you do not have any. Even if you start collecting the data today, it will take at least two years of data collection for ML to have enough to utilize. Before someone says, “Oh, ML can decipher the data and parse out the promotional volume,” promotional timing and types change constantly, so it does not form a proper pattern for ML to parse.

I predict a difficult path forward for utilizing ML in Demand Planning or proper statistical forecasting.

Like everything in life, better late than never. In the next few days, I want to cover:

Why is it difficult or non-existent to capture promotional data?

What can we do about it?

What is missing from the technology provider?