Curiosity Beats Command: In The Know with The CPG Guys

In the Know is a series that spotlights industry leaders sharing the ideas, strategies, and real-world insights driving meaningful impact in the market. InMarket sat down with Peter V.S. Bond and Sri Rajagopalan, hosts of The CPG Guys podcast, during Cannes Lions to talk about measurement, leadership, and what it actually takes to know your consumer. These key themes stood out:

Measurement, not pricing, is the real growth problem.

Most people point to pricing to explain why CPG brands can’t move volume right now; after all, as Sri mentioned, brands have taken roughly 30% pricing over the past few years. But he argues that’s only half the story. Underneath it is a measurement problem: every retailer claims to have the best metrics in the business, there’s no shared industry standard, and most brands still lean on syndicated data and attribution models built for a media landscape that no longer exists. As Sri put it: 

The number one thing the industry needs to fix is how you measure success, what metrics you put into success, and having a sustainable methodology to actually measure it.

Peter ties that gap back to how fast media itself has fragmented. He points to a moment at the Amazon Upfronts: a speaker made the case for Twitch as a real advertising channel, and the next day, none of the seven brand marketers he spoke with had a Twitch strategy, though every one of them planned to build one by the following week. For Peter, that scramble is exactly the risk: brands chasing new channels without the measurement in place to know whether the spend is actually working.

Leaders can’t outsource their proximity to the consumer.

For Peter and Sri, closing that gap starts at the top, not with a new dashboard. Sri is blunt about what it takes to credibly claim you understand today’s consumer: get on the platforms they’re actually using. Peter frames it as a matter of responsibility, not preference: if a CMO isn’t conversant in how their audience uses TikTok or Instagram, people right outside their office are, and leaders owe it to their business to ask. Peter explained:

You have to have the humility to ask them to come in and teach you something you don’t know,” he said, “because you can learn from everybody. You have to be learning constantly.

AI’s job is to buy back time, not cut headcount.

The conversation shifted when talk turned to AI, and both men pushed back on the narrative that’s taken hold across the industry. Sri sees the “replace people with AI” storyline as a fundamental misread; the technology exists to create productivity and efficiency, not to shrink teams. 

Peter sees the upside more specifically for brand marketers: let AI take over production work, like generating content across an entire catalog instead of just a handful of core items, which frees up time for the storytelling that actually connects with people and drives volume.

The brands getting it right lead with curiosity, not command.

Asked who’s actually pulling this off, Sri and Peter didn’t name a channel or a tactic; they named leaders. They pointed to Newell Brands CEO Chris Peterson, whose command of both AI and on-the-ground strategy is fueling what they expect to be a major turnaround story, and to ConAgra Brands, which rebuilt its innovation process around real-time observation instead of backward-looking competitive data, cutting its innovation failure rate in half.

Asked to close on one word each, Sri chose curiosity: “You cannot be the person who sits in that office and takes share reports like you did 20 years ago.”

Peter chose humility, the same instinct that ran through everything they’d said: stay close enough to your team and your consumer that you never stop learning from both

How that shows up in the work

Six years of conversations with CPG leaders have brought Peter and Sri to the same conclusion: InMarket built its business on the idea that brands don’t have a data shortage; they have a proof shortage. Closing that gap, fast enough for brands to actually act on it, is exactly what InMarket’s Outcome Intelligence is built to deliver.

Watch the full conversation from Cannes 2026 here. Connect with our team to see how InMarket can help you build custom, outcome-driven measurement for your brand—get in touch at InMarket.com/Contact.

Catch more from Peter and Sri on The CPG Guys podcast at cpgguys.com.