Every engagement has a start: the moment when the client and the agency sit down for their first discussion.
The client team has usually spent hours, sometimes days, turning their expertise and intuition about their products into a detailed slide deck that sets out exactly what they want the agency to deliver.
The thinking is clear:
“If we define everything up front, the agency can get straight to the proposal and start building. We’ve done the hard work. It’s good to have it all sorted.”
Then comes that first meeting…
Client:
“…and here on the third level of the hierarchy we want to split between Kids and Adults for Chocolate Bars, but for Tins and Boxes we’d like to see Luxury versus Standard.”
Agency:
“This is really helpful preparation — thank you. Can I just check… when you say ‘Kids vs Adults’ for the Bars, how are you defining that…?”
And from that moment, the conversation starts to shift. The art and the science of category design begin to rub against each other. Client assumptions meet data constraints; aspirations meet feasibility.
Suddenly the process feels slower. Tension creeps in and both sides feel a little disappointed, even before a proposal has been presented.
So how do we turn this moment upside down?
How do we make the design phase a positive, productive experience and move quickly towards the client’s goals?
This is where the blend of art and science in RMS category design matters.
Why This Misalignment Happens
Clients define categories from a place of deep expertise:
- They know their consumers
- They know their commercial strategy
- They understand the role their brands play
- They see the nuances that make a category dynamic
Category vision always starts with strategy. Friction occurs when the vision meets the realities of an RMS dataset.
Why?
- RMS data is built from item-level attributes (brand, flavour, size, packaging material, form, and many more).
- Attributes must appear consistently on the label across all manufacturers.
- Some desired splits (Kids vs Adults, Luxury vs Standard) are subjective. They can be built through mapping rules, but those rules need to be robust and maintainable.
- RMS attributes reflect what a product is, not how a consumer perceives it.
So Is the Client Stuck?
Absolutely not.
Most data agencies can work with clients to build marketing attributes using pack attributes as building blocks. They are increasingly using AI tools to enhance their ability to bring items together into highly specific client definitions. The constraints of hierarchies are largely a thing of the past, with attributes used to cut and dice data in a more fluid and flexible way.
This is where the magic happens. Where science and art combine to create transparent, rule-based segmentations which genuinely support the client’s strategy.
When done well, this gives the client a category definition which:
- speaks their language
- aligns with their goals
- is reproducible, consistent, sustainable and affordable
- and remains grounded in feasible, auditable data
But this requires partnership from the start.
The Take-Away
The client knows what they want to report.
The agency knows how to segment the data to deliver it.
Bringing the two together early in open, transparent collaboration is what transforms potential friction into a smooth, confident journey toward an excellent outcome.
When both sides lean into the process, the design phase becomes not just fruitful but genuinely enjoyable: a shared creative moment where strategy and data meet, and expectations are achieved.
If this subject is of interest to you and you would like to dig deeper into the way category and product vision can be best represented, please get in touch for a chat.