I was one of Brian's partners who "invented" category management. I did all the metrics that knit the process together in 1993. Last year I led a consortium of 17 companies including Walmart,P&G, IRI, Kantar Retail, Ahold, Mondelez, etc. in creating CatMan 2.0, a 330 page digital document posted on the Category Management Association site. It would be interesting to read these comments after people have plowed through the document. Suffice it to say that we have made remarkable strides in data and analytics. I have subsequently written a white paper called "how e-com will change CPG marketing and the retail experience." It touches upon some of the comments made on this page. The most important change will be the capability of the retail e-commerce sites to suggestively sell other items (categories) in a need state triggered by a specific purchase in the need state (shopper-centric need state marketing). This is easily done in the digital world but impossible to do in a brick-and-mortar environment. Meanwhile, shopper targeting capabilities increase by the hour as do predictive analytics capabilities to identify and activate valuable households. Category management is a fast moving train which few have been able to board.