Is your brand earning its growth — or buying it?
The MVE Brand Growth Snapshot. A diagnostic tool for CPG brand teams.
What it is
The MVE Brand Growth Snapshot positions your brand or brand-pack across three interconnected grids — the Unit Economics–Volume Grid, the Velocity–Distribution Grid, and the Loyalty–Penetration Grid.
For each variable you select the descriptor that best reflects your brand's trending situation. Your grid positions, segment descriptions, maturity scores, and strategic priorities generate automatically.
It takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete. No data required. No analyst needed. It works as a solo assessment or — most powerfully — as a facilitated team exercise that surfaces the strategic conversations your commercial leadership needs to have.
What is MVE?
Margin Velocity Economics (MVE)™ is a commercial diagnostic framework developed by Manoli Kulutbanis of UpScalability.
It decomposes Sales and Marketing Contribution margin performance — the fully-loaded commercial contribution that actually funds brand growth — into its underlying drivers across three interconnected grids.
Unlike conventional P&L reporting, MVE allocates the real costs of selling and marketing each brand at the brand-pack, channel, and geography level, making visible whether growth is being earned through genuine consumer pull or purchased through escalating trade spend and promotional investment.
The MVE Brand Growth Snapshot is the self-assessment entry point into the framework.
What you get
MVE Brand Growth Snapshot — Excel template (.xltx), no macros, works in Excel for Windows and Excel 365 for Mac
MVE Brand Growth Analysis: The 3 Grids — full reference document with all 18 segment descriptions, strategic implications, and brand examples
One-page User Manual — quick reference guide, printable for team sessions
Instant download — files delivered immediately after purchase
Full refund, no questions asked, within 30 days
The team exercise
The snapshot works best when completed as a team exercise.
Bring your commercial leadership around the table — sales, category, marketing, finance — and work through the descriptor selections together.
Where team members choose different descriptors for the same variable, the divergence is the conversation. A sales leader who sees expanding distribution while the CFO sees deteriorating unit economics are not disagreeing — they are describing two sides of a Costly Scale dynamic that the framework immediately names and frames.
The tool is also designed to be repurposed. The descriptor architecture is an analytical template that can be adapted for other brand or business assessment frameworks beyond the three MVE grids.
About the tool
The MVE Brand Growth Snapshot is a directional self-assessment based on informed judgment.
It is not a substitute for the full MVE Brand Growth Financial Impact Analysis — which uses actual syndicated data from Circana, NIQ, SPINS, Numerator, and VIP to quantify the dollar impact of every grid movement at the brand-pack, channel, retailer, and geography level.
The snapshot gives commercial teams a shared vocabulary and a common framework before the data work begins.
Complete it together, discuss where your team diverges, and use the output to frame the strategic priorities that matter most right now.
If the snapshot surfaces questions that require a deeper answer — or if the grid positions your team identifies point toward decisions significant enough to warrant data-grounded quantification — I would welcome the conversation.
Ready to run your first MVE diagnostic?
Full refund within 30 days, no questions asked.
Have a question?
Licensing
-
Single-user professional use for your own brand assessment and internal team. Not for resale or redistribution.
-
For independent advisors and agencies using this tool in paid client engagements. Contact for terms.
-
For organizations deploying the tool across multiple teams, brands, or business units. Contact for terms.
To enquire about the licensing options, send me a message via the “Schedule a Conversation” button.