You already believe in omnichannel. You've seen the data, you know the shopper has changed and you know your category's growth story is being written across multiple channels, not just on the store shelf.

The problem isn't conviction … it's communication.

Most category managers who struggle to get omnichannel off the ground aren't stuck because of bad strategy. They're stuck because they haven't told the right story, one compelling enough to earn stakeholder buy-in, align cross-functional teams around a shared priority and earn retailer trust that makes execution possible.

The best stories follow a proven framework built around these key elements: four storytelling signposts (Setting, Characters, Conflict and Resolution) plus a BIG Idea. Together, these ingredients give your story a structure that's easy to follow, hard to ignore and built to inspire action.

Here's how to use storytelling to make the case for omnichannel investment.

The retail landscape has shifted

Storytelling Signpost: Setting

Setting builds context and gets everyone on the same page by emphasizing what's happening in your audience's world. Think of it as a mini-education that shines a spotlight on the issues you want to solve together. Without it, your audience has no shared starting point and no reason to care about what comes next.

Traditional category management was centered around physical retail. For decades, it worked. Years of focus went into optimizing the system of planograms, JBPs and shelf reviews. But the world those systems were built for has fundamentally changed.

Digital commerce is no longer just a separate channel to monitor; it's the primary engine of total category growth. By the end of 2027, digital commerce is expected to represent 45% of global retail sales and drive more than 60% of total retail growth (Source: Flywheel Digital). Right now, it already accounts for 83.7% of total US CPG dollar growth (Source: NielsenIQ).

What’s changed isn’t just where growth is happening, but how growth is won. Omnichannel operates across three levels of incrementality:

Defensive: Keeping the shoppers you already have by showing up consistently across their journey. If you aren’t visible, findable and shoppable in digital moments, you’re actively losing share you already earned.
Competitive: Winning shoppers at the moment of decision. Digital shelves, search results and media placements are where switching happens fastest and most frequently.
Designed: Creating new demand through better experiences. Driving higher basket sizes, new use cases and more frequent trips through intentional assortment, content and activation.

The reality is simple: the brands and retailers who win omnichannel will keep their shoppers, win new ones and grow the category. And those who don’t will fund that growth for someone else.

What this signpost should accomplish: Ground your audience in a shared reality before you make your case. The goal isn't to overwhelm them with statistics. It's to make sure everyone in the room understands the business landscape before you ask them to navigate it differently.

Meet your omnichannel shopper

Storytelling Signpost: Characters

Characters are irresistible because they're human, and meeting one in a story creates an emotional connection. In a business story, characters serve a critical function: they show your audience who or what matters, and why.

Omnichannel shoppers aren't a future consumer segment. They're shopping right now, moving between physical and digital environments in ways that make a singular channel strategy increasingly inadequate.

Consider who they are: 75% of shoppers today use both digital and physical touchpoints in the same purchase journey (Source: ShipStation). They start their search on Amazon, which is now the first stop for 51% of US product searches, compare options online and may still end up buying in store (Source: Jungle Scout). More than half of U.S. shoppers have already used AI tools to assist their shopping (Source: Future Commerce).

To make this real, consider an everyday category experience.

A shopper realizes they’re running low on coffee. They search on Amazon for “best coffee for cold brew,” scan reviews, compare formats and notice a brand they’ve never tried. Later, they stop at Walmart with something already in mind. In the aisle, they either confirm their choice or switch if they can’t find it, recognize it or trust it.

Now zoom out. That decision was shaped long before the physical shelf. If your brand or product didn’t show up in search, didn’t have strong reviews, was out of stock online or created friction in-store, you were never really in the consideration set. The shelf didn’t lose the sale. The journey did.

The bottom line? The omnichannel shopper’s path to purchase is now fragmented, informed and increasingly influenced and decided before the shelf.

What this signpost should accomplish: Make the omnichannel shopper real and recognizable to your audience. Data tells the big-picture story, but a character makes your audience feel it. When they can picture this shopper, they're far more likely to feel the urgency of the conflict that follows. If you have proprietary data or examples that show where shoppers are dropping off along the omnichannel journey, this is the place to bring it in. That specificity is what turns a generic industry story into a powerful business case.

What’s getting in the way of omnichannel success

Storytelling Signpost: Conflict

Conflict is what gives a story momentum. Without tension, your audience has no reason to care or act. Name the conflict clearly, and you get to be a hero twice: first when you identify the problem, and again when you propose a way to fix it.

Most organizations understand the omnichannel opportunity but have a harder time operationalizing it. Why?

These six major barriers consistently emerge and hold back the industry:

Insufficient omnichannel data and insights: Data is often fragmented across retailers, platforms and internal systems. Organizations struggle to create a single view of category performance across channels.
Limited omnichannel understanding: Many teams lack fluency in eCommerce and omnichannel dynamics. Data and insights exist, but teams often lack the context or training to interpret them confidently.
Limited focus or prioritization: Omnichannel initiatives are frequently treated as incremental rather than strategic, which results in inconsistent investment and attention. Many teams aren't measured on eCommerce or omnichannel KPIs which can then limit accountability for prioritization.
In-store planning resource requirements: Most category teams are still optimized and resourced for physical retail planning which can be very time-intensive, leaving limited time or resources to expand into digital environments.
Multi-channel organizational structures: Separate teams for eCommerce, in-store, media and supply chain create fragmentation and competing priorities, especially when measured on conflicting KPIs.
Missing stakeholder alignment and collaboration: True omnichannel growth requires alignment across retailers, manufacturers and internal functions, which rarely happens consistently today due to the silos and competing priorities.

None of these barriers are insurmountable, but the cost of inaction shows up quickly and compounds over time.

In the short term:

Shopper friction increases across the journey.
Conversion rates decline as products are harder to find, evaluate or trust.
Loyalty erodes as shoppers default to whoever shows up best in the moment.
Sales and share begin to shift, often subtly at first.

But the longer-term consequences are even more significant.

In the long term:

You lose credibility as a category leader.
You become less valuable as a joint business planning partner.
Your ability to influence retailer strategy weakens.
Investment, visibility and priority shift toward those who bring stronger omnichannel insights and activation plans.

Left unaddressed, these costs quietly undermine your position as a category leader.

What this signpost should accomplish: Be specific about the conflict your audience is already living. The more they recognize themselves in it, the more urgent the resolution becomes. After sharing the industry hurdles, highlight the ones your company is specifically challenged with (and where they’re already doing a good job).

The insight that changes everything

Storytelling Signpost: BIG Idea

The BIG Idea is the heart of your story: a single, concise, conversational statement that captures the "so what?" of your story with high-level benefits. It's the ONE thing you want your audience to remember, a mental bridge that brings them through the conflict and prepares them for the resolution. Think of it as the "a-ha" moment where tension gives way to clarity.

Once you've named the conflict, it's time to land your most important message. To make the case for omnichannel, your BIG Idea might sound something like this:

“The future of our brands and our share will be won or lost in the omnichannel experience.”

Done right, omnichannel category management is the strategic solution that drives the category forward and reverses trends that have been holding it back. It’s clear that omnichannel capability is quickly becoming a requirement for relevance, not a differentiator. This is the insight that needs to be explicitly shared to make the investment case possible.

What the BIG Idea should accomplish: Give your audience a single, memorable statement that bridges the conflict and resolution. If they walk away remembering nothing else, this is the line that should stick.

From strategy to investment: making the ask

Storytelling Signpost: Resolution

The resolution brings your characters and your audience safely through the conflict. It's the "meat and potatoes" of your story, the place where you detail your proposed strategy, recommendation or call to action. A strong resolution must be earned. Build the context, introduce the tension, land the BIG Idea and only then ask your audience to act.

Here's the future state worth building toward: a unified view of category performance across channels, shared omnichannel KPIs that keep everyone accountable and retailers who see you as an indispensable partner, not just a vendor with data.

Getting there requires most organizations to make a clear and coordinated set of asks across five areas:

Data & Tools
- Access to integrated omnichannel data (POS, eCommerce, media, inventory).
- Centralized dashboards and reporting environments.
- Standardized metrics and definitions across channels.
- Tools that enable faster insight-to-action, not just reporting.
Time & Focus
- Dedicated time in category planning cycles for omnichannel strategy.
- Inclusion of eCommerce and digital shelf in all key meetings (not separate workstreams).
- Clear prioritization of omnichannel initiatives vs. “when we have time.”
Capabilities & Training
- Structured training on omnichannel shopper behavior and category strategy.
- Playbooks for digital shelf, retail media, assortment and activation.
- Ongoing reinforcement, not one-time learning.
Operating Model & Accountability
- Omnichannel KPIs embedded into roles, goals and performance reviews.
- Shared scorecards across functions (sales, marketing, ecommerce, supply).
- Clear ownership of omnichannel outcomes, not fragmented accountability.
Collaboration & Governance
- Cross-functional planning cadences (monthly, quarterly, annual).
- Stronger integration into joint business planning with retailers.
- Clear governance models to align decisions and remove friction.

None of these asks are individually complex. The challenge is that they must happen together — because omnichannel category management isn’t a tool, a team or a tactic. It’s a system.

What this signpost should accomplish: Make the asks concrete and ground them in the story you've already told: the world we’re in, the shoppers we’re serving, what’s at stake and what success looks like. The resolution only lands if the rest of the story did its job.

The case for omnichannel starts with a story

The CPG industry has spent decades perfecting category management for physical retail. Rebooting it for an omnichannel world takes more than better data and better tools. It takes the storytelling skill to communicate it in a way that moves people to act.

The category teams that lead this transformation will know how to tell a story that’s clear enough to align the organization, earn the investment and strengthen the retailer partnerships that drive category growth.

The omnichannel opportunity is clear. Now it’s time to tell the story.

Are you ready to press CTRL+ALT+OMNI?

About the Authors

The Presentation Company (TPC) is a corporate training company that helps talented businesspeople bring clarity and meaning to their ideas and data and influence decisions through storytelling. For over 20 years, TPC has partnered with companies that support the Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail industries – including leading brands Kraft Heinz, Colgate-Palmolive and Nestlé – to transform teams into strategic, influential visual communicators and drive business forward. We believe that with our storytelling framework, some simple guidance and the right tools, everyone can be a great business storyteller!

Chris Perry is the Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr, a Satellite Center of Excellence (COE) for Omni Education & Change Management on a mission to help empower first movers — both people and organizations — to win in a disruptive marketplace. As a CPG eCommerce practitioner, executive educator and advisor, he has led eCommerce at Reckitt, Wellness Pet Company and Kellogg’s and was most recently VP of Executive Education at Edge by Ascential (now Flywheel) supporting Fortune 500 global brands’ eCommerce and omnichannel strategies.