Budgeting & Planning Studio

Trade Promotion Planning functionality is provided by the Budgeting & Planning Studio, all integrated with the execution and analysis modules.

The Challenges

A sure way to run promotions that are costly but fruitless is to badly plan them. Unfortunately, many companies do just that. Poor planning of promotions also reflects badly on the brand being promoted, from both customer and consumer points of view. The most obvious evidence of bad planning of volumes, or the lack of sharing of planned volumes to production and distribution - are stock-outs. Not only is potential lift not met, but the results of the promotion are probably worthless in determining what promotions are best for the future, and in predicting likely sales lifts. And while contemplating the loss of the fixed promotional costs for little benefit, there is the added indignity of possibly having to pay customers their negotiated variable allowances for alternate products they offered to consumers in lieu. Once the realization sinks in that the alternate products were from a competitor, and your precious trade funds helped sell them, it’s past time to improve the methods used to plan promotions!

Features

• Users can define promotion and contract attributes for both customers and items
• Multiple customers and items can be included, or excluded, for any date range
• Calendar, Grid, List and Graphical views
• One or more pricing or promotion components can be specified
• Creation of trade fund accounts and budget allocation rules
• Target goals for effectiveness, including volume, sales, and competitive performance by promotion
• Collaboration supported through rules-based workflow
• Shipment, POS scan, accruals and other data is all made available as it comes to hand

Benefits

• Gaining consumer demand insights into every item merchandised within a retail category
• Planning comprehensive trade events including price adjustments, ad placement, and display support
• Aggregating multiple trade promotions to assemble a category plan, and then viewing that plan in total
• Improving sell-in by accurately forecasting brand and retailer category results for the plan, including total promoted volume, and incremental volume