Brand managers are "masters of all trades," acquiring expertise in areas such as operations, finance, demand chain management, sales, R & D, marketing and communications. They manage the responsibility of running their brand as if it were their own business and influencing its performance. The common thread among these strategists is typically an intense entrepreneurial spirit with a driving need to understand consumer needs and desires, and how to transform them into successful marketing communications, advertising campaigns or sales efforts.

Every day, brand managers solve complex problems, evaluate strategic alternatives, and make tough calls that have a resonating impact on the overall company bottom line. They must follow this up with best-in-class field execution designed to maximize brand presence and deliver on brand performance.

Brand managers and their internal partners in sales, finance, operations, and logistics need rapid access to the same timely and accurate information to drive fact-based business decisions. Velocity automates tedious, repetitive tasks and allows the marketing and their internal partners to focus on driving growth instead of wasting time manipulating data and searching for information. Velocity provides them with the solution set and guidance they need to not only exceed consumers' expectations and execute with excellence, but also outperform the competition.

Velocity allows brand managers to leverage store-level POS data from their retailer partners in conjunction with syndicated and corporate data to effectively:

• Track and analyze business performance
• Respond rapidly to new business opportunities or challenges
• Monitor, refine and effectively deploy promotion execution plans
• Track effectiveness of past marketing events and spend
• Reduce time spent on performance analysis and data gathering
• React quickly to unforeseen events and demand changes
• Launch new products and product extensions
• Monitor budgets with respect to forecasted volumes
• Analyze, manage and execute against product plans e.g. pricing, forecasting, performance variations, etc.