Campbell Soup, like most food manufacturers, faced grocery chain and wholesale demand for its goods driven by Campbell's own promotional pricing structure rather than retail consumer demand. Former policies to encourage overstock created huge swings in production and inventory levels. Campbell's introduced continuous product replenishment (CPR) under which they would manage inventory for their customers, enabled by electronic data interchange to link supply to actual demand. Implementing this channel shift required a restructuring of relationships with its customers and a radical restructuring of its promotional policies.

The merchandising manager of a supermarket chain leads an effort to reorganize the process of buying and delivering products from manufacturers to their warehouse for further distribution to stores. The company is an early mover in implementing efficient consumer response.

The evolution of Procter & Gamble's development of efficient consumer response (ECR) involved a series of trials, a resolve to distribute diapers on the basis of product movement, a conscious effort to move to a new means of distribution across all lines, a first cut at a new system, and finally, the development of the existing mix of integrated IT systems linking the value chain from factory to shelf.

Campbell Soup, like most food manufacturers, faced grocery chain and wholesale demand for its goods driven by Campbell's own promotional pricing structure rather than retail consumer demand. Former policies to encourage overstock created huge swings in production and inventory levels. Campbell's introduced continuous product replenishment (CPR) under which they would manage inventory for their customers, enabled by electronic data interchange to link supply to actual demand. Implementing this channel shift required a restructuring of relationships with its customers and a radical restructuring of its promotional policies.

A cognitive style model provides some explanation of the processes affecting managers' assessment of their environment. Systematic thinkers tend to look for methods, make plans, define the quality of solutions in terms of method, discard alternatives quickly, conduct ordered searches for additional information and complete all steps of the analysis they have begun. Intuitive thinkers keep the overall problem continuously in mind, redefine the problem frequently, rely on hunches, consider a number of alternatives simultaneously and explore and abandon hunches quickly.