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Advantage Solutions Inc.
Advantage Solutions provides outsourced sales, marketing, and merchandising services that help consumer goods brands get their products onto store shelves and sold to shoppers.
Walk into almost any grocery store and look at the shelves. Someone had to persuade the store to carry each product, arrange it on the shelf, build the display at the end of the aisle, and hand out the free samples on a Saturday afternoon. Advantage Solutions does much of that work for consumer goods companies and retailers. It is essentially the outsourced sales force and marketing muscle behind the products in your shopping cart, working on behalf of brands that make everything from snacks to shampoo.
The business works like this. A food company wants its new cereal on shelves at thousands of stores across the country. Hiring and managing a national sales team is expensive, so it outsources the job to Advantage. Advantage's people pitch the product to retailers, negotiate shelf space, stock and arrange displays, and run sampling events where shoppers taste the product. Retailers also hire Advantage to help with things like in-store merchandising. The brands pay for the expertise and the feet on the ground; the retailers get help making their stores look good and sell more. Advantage makes money mainly from the services it charges those manufacturers and retailers, so its fortunes rise and fall with the consumer goods industry. When big brands are launching products or fighting for shelf space, they need more of Advantage's help. When retailers squeeze suppliers on price or brands cut spending, Advantage feels it. The company went public in 2020 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, and it has grown partly by buying smaller marketing and sales firms. It also carries a heavy debt load from those deals, which is a real burden for a business whose revenue is not growing quickly.
The company's edge comes from scale. Managing thousands of salespeople and merchandisers across the country is hard, and Advantage has the infrastructure to do it. Its main weakness is that it sits in the middle: it depends on the budgets of big manufacturers and the goodwill of big retailers, and it does not own any brands of its own. It competes with other outsourced sales firms and with brands deciding to build their own teams. In short, Advantage Solutions is the invisible army that stocks the shelves and sells the samples, paid by the companies that want their products in front of you.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026