Best-in-Class Trade Marketing

Products don’t land on shelves by luck. They earn their place there.

At Grand Central Creative, we’re a trade marketing agency that sits between your brand, the retailers who stock it, and the shoppers who actually buy it. That’s the whole job: exciting buyers, keeping distributors on side, and giving your products the visibility and presence they need to actually sell in-store and online.

Launching a new FMCG line, growing drinks distribution, or building category share with a retailer you already work with, the challenge is the same. Showing up ready to trade, not just ready to launch.

Trade marketing that actually moves stock

Getting listed is the easy part. The real work starts once you’re on shelf, competing for attention against everyone else in the category. As a full-service trade marketing partner, we help brands build stronger relationships with buyers, put together sell-in stories that land, and run activation that shows up in the numbers, not just the mood board.

In practice, that means lining up what you want to say about the brand with what actually gets a buyer to say yes, and what gets a shopper to pick you over the one next to you on shelf.

What we do

We work across FMCG, drinks and wider retail categories. Most of it falls into five areas:

Sell-in stories and retailer pitches. Category managers see a lot of pitch decks, we build the ones with the shopper insight and commercial case to actually win the meeting.

POS and in-store activation. Permanent fixtures, temporary displays, anything that needs to hold its own on a shop floor, we design it and get it produced.

Ecommerce and the digital shelf. Amazon listings, online grocery, retailer web banners, digital asset management, the version of your shelf that shoppers scroll past instead of walk past.

Distributor and field team support. Incentive schemes, sales tools, trade toolkits, the material that keeps your sales force and distributor network actually selling.

Trade promotions and shopper campaigns. Sampling, on-pack promotions, co-marketed retail activity, the push that gets someone to try you for the first time.

Why work with us

“Success in retail doesn’t just happen. It’s planned. It’s activated. It’s tracked.”

We know FMCG and drinks inside out, planograms, margin pressure, supply chain realities, the way buyers actually think. We handle the whole process ourselves, from strategy and creative through to print and digital rollout, so you’re not juggling five different suppliers. And everything we build gets judged the same way: did it move stock, grow share, and pay back the investment?

Ready to turn shelf space into market share?

Get in touch, and let’s talk about what winning in your category actually looks like.