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 probably 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, its 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 for a 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 to individual or groupings of promotions
• Target goals for effectiveness, including volume, space, and competitive performance defined for each promotion
• Collaboration supported through rules-based workflow, security, and escalation
• Multiple scenarios can be compared prior to commitment, including modeling template or standard promotion and contract terms
• Shipment and other actual data such as POS scans is made available as it comes to hand

Benefits

• Gaining consumer demand insights into every item merchandised within a retail category
• Planning and predicting comprehensive trade events including price adjustments, ad placement, and display support
• Aggregating multiple trade promotions to assemble a category plan, and then re-predicting that plan in total
• Evaluating trade activity assuming a nested EDLP buy-down throughout a broader planning window
• Improving sell-in by accurately forecasting brand and retailer category results for the plan, including cannibalization, total promoted volume, and turn volume

Next Steps

To find out how Flintfox Trade Promotion Management can meet your specific needs, contact us. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your situation.