Today’s guest is Todd Kirk, Principal and Managing Director at Middle Game Services. Kirk explains his background across client-side (e.g., Coca-Cola), retail data (IRI), and consulting, and says Middle Game focuses on performance marketing at the shelf—assortment, merchandising, pricing, and their overlaps, such as promotion—using a shopper-centric, “wide-angle view” of choices. He contrasts shifting existing tactics with “better things” like line-filling, imitation, and true innovation, and describes applying choice-based analytics to tracking data (e.g., Nielsen/IRI and e-commerce). Discussing a key growth problem, he argues companies overload on low-probability innovations, starving the core “base” (a Jenga analogy), creating value-chain inefficiencies, and often generating transfer demand instead of incrementality, urging portfolio and retailer impacts to be modelled before launch.
00:00 Show Intro
01:01 Meet Todd and Middle Game
04:11 Shelf Choices and the Four Ps
11:26 Do Better Things Wide Angle Growth
20:15 Growth Problems and Closing
What Is Actually Driving Profitable Growth Today?
Our next executive workshops are designed to answer that question directly.
In a confidential, small-group setting, we combine current research, structured frameworks, and open discussion focused on your specific challenges.
Each one-hour session addresses a single strategic issue — Volume vs. Value, Demand Spaces, Shrinking for Growth — with the aim of moving beyond tactics and clarifying where growth is truly coming from, and where it is not.
