TRADE PROMOTION
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SECTION TWO
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Six Ways to Revolutionize Trade Strategy
Trade promotions are a big business with usually little return to the
brand. Optimizing your trade strategy by using a comprehensive
science-based system, designed to allow you to collaborate with
retailers and produce shopper-centric plans, can help revolutionize
your trade strategy and deliver bottom-line results.
Meanwhile, the marketplace is rapidly changing and there is increased pressure to maximize return on investment. It is becoming essential that consumer products companies use best-of-breed tools to help make better decisions deliver on their financial and business objectives. Using an analytical cloud-based platform helps enable consumer products companies to collaborate with retailers to develop winning trade strategies and stay ahead of market trends and the competition.
1. Be Comprehensive
Keep teams aligned with strategic “top-down” trade planning and customer-focused “bottoms-up” planning perspectives. A planning system should address the macro needs of brand marketing and trade finance in order to enable macro planning. It's imperative to understand consumer demand and use insight to allocate funds across regions and accounts.
2. Get Shopper-Centric
Be more precise and localized with your promotion and pricing strategies, helping you to be more relevant with consumers. Use advanced science and shopper segmentation to better understand shifts in consumer demand, and to optimize your finite trade funds, helping to increase your ROI. Embed shopper insights into trade planning decisions to allow your teams to act on localized nuances on consumer demand, brand and pack size preferences, and to understand avenues for growth.
3. Collaborate with Retailers
Break down silos among internal teams, and externally with retail partners. Measure the impact of a trade plan against virtually the entire retail category at the SKU level. Understand the impact of an event based on a retailer's merchandising strategy to create better forecasts and a stronger partnership. Align your systems, demand modeling and analytical insights with your retail customers to provide a stronger foundation for profitable outcomes and plan acceptance.
4. Incorporate Science to Maximize ROI
Embrace modern demand modeling techniques using historical promotion outcomes for clearer direction and alignment to one trade plan. Give your teams advanced consumer insights into what is working and what is not. Use a single planning system designed to automate tedious planning cycles to save time on your trade plans and help ensure guidelines and constraints are embedded into the planning process. Use post-event analytics to present a retrospective on what was planned and what was executed, providing clarification for trade optimization.
5. Link Systems
No more swivel seating! Move your optimized plans into downstream TPM and deal management systems, making your job easier and helping to enable more rapid field execution. A one-time integration investment creates a repeatable cycle that is more efficient and frees up time to develop more effective promotions.
6. Use a Best-of-Breed Platform
Standardize on a world-class platform that has industry-wide adoption to help your trade and brand teams create winning trade plans, shorten your time to value, and realize financial benefits now and in the future.
This article was complied from an introduction to “Revolutionary Decisions,” a summer webinar series from IBM.
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