How to Build RGM Capability Across International Markets: Dr. Oetker

Building the RGM capabilities, confidence, and ownership needed to act on commercial decisions consistently across markets plays a huge role in achieving sustainable growth.

In our recent webinar, Emma Swiers, Executive Manager of NRM at Dr. Oetker, shared how she has driven RGM capability-building across 42 markets over the last three years.*

Drawing on experience across markets with varying levels of maturity, data availability, and commercial complexity, Emma outlined a practical framework to help teams move from receiving answers to generating them independently.

Emma's discussion centered on four key points:

1. Understanding the barriers that prevent consistent RGM application
2. Why experiential learning produces better outcomes than instruction alone
3. A structured four-milestone framework for RGM capability building
4. How to adapt the framework to market maturity

This article unpacks key insights from the discussion for RGM leaders looking to scale consistent practices across complex, multi-market organizations.

Watch the full webinar with Emma Swiers from Dr. Oetker here.

Key Barriers to Successful RGM Capability Building

Before proposing solutions, Emma argues that the first task is to understand why Revenue Growth Management (RGM) practices fail to take hold. The challenges are familiar: trade spend that keeps rising year on year, portfolio gaps surfacing only when it is too late to act, promotions that erode margin rather than build volume. But the obstacles between diagnosis and action are often misread.

Time and capacity pressures featured prominently in our webinar audience poll, alongside competing priorities and a preference for quick fixes. These are real and legitimate constraints. The more difficult barriers are the less visible ones.

Sometimes colleagues can be uncomfortable with acknowledging that past decisions haven't delivered. There's nothing wrong with that. It's an opportunity to grow and to learn.

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The goal is to create conditions in which improving on existing practice is seen as an opportunity rather than a verdict on what came before. Getting the framing right before proposing a solution shapes everything that follows.

Creating a Culture of Learning, Not Judgment

Capability-building programs often require commercial teams to revisit decisions, assumptions, or ways of working that have been in place for years. Frame that process as a critique of past choices, and resistance is natural. Frame it as an opportunity to improve and learn, and engagement follows.

This mindset influences every stage of the capability-building process. Teams are encouraged to question assumptions, experiment with new approaches, and learn from mistakes without feeling judged. Several of the markets Emma worked with later described the experience as one where they felt "supported rather than judged", an outcome she considers an important indicator of success.

“People who are in receipt of a solution from an RGM perspective, we want them to be open to new ways of working."
Emma Swiers, Executive Manager of NRM at Dr. Oetker

Why Experiential Learning Produces Stronger RGM Outcomes

Many capability programs rely heavily on instruction: workshops, playbooks, and manuals, as well as training sessions. Emma highlighted a practical principle in capability building: people learn most effectively through direct experience. Working with real business scenarios, making decisions, and applying insights in practice typically yields stronger, more durable learning outcomes than passive instruction alone.

"We learn best through direct experience. That is working with real business scenarios and making decisions rather than necessarily getting the answer."
Emma Swiers, Executive Manager of NRM at Dr. Oetker

Hear more from Emma and Dr. Oetker's RGM strategy in our Dr. Oetker customer success story

This changes the calculus of capability building considerably. Delivering a polished analysis back to a market may answer the immediate question, but it does not build the judgment needed to answer the next one. Coaching a team to arrive at the answer themselves is slower upfront, but produces more durable capability and removes the dependency on a central team over time.

The same principle underpins the Buynomics RGM Academy courses, which focus on hands-on learning through real-world RGM scenarios.

A Four-Milestone Framework for Building RGM Capability

Emma’s framework has been applied across multiple RGM levers, market types, and category contexts. The structure adapts to market, lever, and category context, while providing a repeatable scaffold that makes capability building scalable.

Milestone 1: Setting the scene. The market presents its own state-of-the-nation analysis. This step ensures the central team understands the local context rather than arriving with pre-formed views, and it aligns all stakeholders on expectations, timelines, and competing priorities before work begins.

Milestone 2: Capability building with real data. This is the most time-intensive step and the foundation of the capability-building process. Training and tool onboarding happen using the market's own data, applied to live business questions. The goal is for teams to leave with genuine first insights rather than surface familiarity with a methodology.

Milestone 3: Findings and solutions. Teams present their analysis and recommendations. The quality of this presentation is itself a measure of how well the capability-building process has landed. Markets are encouraged to present their own findings, while the central team provides support and coaching where needed.

Milestone 4: Prioritization and wrap-up. The final session focuses on decisions: which initiatives to pursue, in what timeframe, and against which retailers. Short-term and longer-term priorities are traded off against each other, and next steps are agreed.

Adapting the Framework by Market Maturity

Not all markets require the same level of central support. Emma makes a practical distinction that is easy to overlook in standardized programs: the framework stays constant, but the depth of engagement varies.

Less mature markets benefit from more structured facilitation, more frequent checkpoints, and active coaching between milestones. More mature markets are better served by a lighter central touch, with the international team in a challenging, advisory role rather than a delivery role. The same logic applies within a market, where individual teams and functions can sit at very different levels of experience.

"In some instances, with less mature markets, we might lean in more. We might have more structure, more framework, and we might have more regular checkpoints in the journey as well."
Emma Swiers, Executive Manager of NRM at Dr. Oetker

Measuring the Success of a Capability Program

A recurring question from RGM practitioners is how to report the value of capability investment back to leadership. Emma takes a balanced approach that combines quantitative output measures with qualitative indicators of behavior change.

At the program level, she tracks the volume and size of identified initiatives, risk-adjusted for implementation difficulty. At the individual and team level, she uses pre- and post-assessments and looks to the Milestone 3 presentation as one indicator of progress; how teams frame their findings and defend their thinking often reflects how far the capability has moved."

"The higher up we go in an organization, the feedback I get is that if we try to implement the right behaviors and we succeed at that, then the results will follow."
Emma Swiers, Executive Manager of NRM at Dr. Oetker 

Emma also places significant weight on qualitative feedback, including participants' observations that the process felt "supported rather than judged." Beyond its intrinsic value, this kind of response proves effective for internal advocacy, building the case for expanding the program to other markets.

Building RGM Capability That Lasts

For the Dr. Oetker central team, capability-building is most effective when teams work with real business questions, real data, and the tools they will ultimately use in practice. Emma noted that for certain RGM levers where internal capabilities do not cover the full scope of the analysis, the team supplements its approach with external platforms such as Buynomics.

As RGM continues to grow in importance, Emma's experience across 42 markets suggests that capability-building succeeds when teams learn by doing, feel supported throughout the process, and are empowered to arrive at their own answers. As Emma concluded, "It's not just about what you deliver, but how you deliver it as well."

How Buynomics Supports RGM Capability Programs

The Buynomics platform helps teams test commercial hypotheses using Virtual Shoppers AI, which replicates actual shopper buying behavior.

Buynomics’ proprietary Virtual Shoppers AI was developed to serve as the foundation for all questions of shopper insights and commercial decision-making. It enables you to run agent-based simulations to predict your shopper behavior with precision. Trained on your data, each virtual shopper has an individual set of preferences for different brands, product sizes, and other attributes.

That specificity is what separates simulation from theory. Teams aren't working through abstract frameworks; they're running pricing, portfolio, and promotions scenarios against their actual market data. The decisions they practice are the same ones that, when applied, improve outcomes for the manufacturer, the retailer, and the shopper, ultimately creating a triple win situation.

Learn how Buynomics can help you accelerate your RGM teams’ capability building by booking a demo today.

*At Dr. Oetker, RGM capabilities fall under Net Revenue Management (NRM). We use RGM throughout for consistency.