For retailers and their supplier partners, a positive intent is just the beginning. Only when data is accessible, and friction is minimized can top-notch results be delivered.
This is especially critical when it comes to trade promotion planning, where alignment of interests between retailers and brands has always been a challenge. Imprecise forecasting and measurement make fact-based negotiations difficult. At times the efforts take on the feeling of a “zero-sum” game.
Experience has shown that conducting these processes within a data-sharing environment can be a powerful difference-maker. Streamlining trade promotion processes can yield greater consensus, precision and efficiency for trading partners. Ultimately, trust flows from good practices and predictable results.
Retailer-Vendor Collaboration in Context
The operational and financial advantages of sharing logistics information have long been well understood by retailer and CPG business leaders, and they have put communications systems in place to forecast shipments and optimize stock levels.
“Companies with advanced supplier-collaboration capabilities tend to outperform their peers,” said McKinsey in a report that addressed supply chain practices.
In contrast, sharing category and store-level data in the context of trade fund negotiations has historically made many retailers uncomfortable, even protective. Progress in this regard has been harder-fought, and the adoption of advanced solutions has lagged.
“In traditional retailer-supplier relationships, a major challenge is that each partner has a separate view of the customer — separate data sets, different performance goals and divergent ways of measuring impact,” say the authors of a report from IRI (now Circana).
In a research study, “Over 50% of surveyed retailers and suppliers indicated that their biggest pain points are the following: lack of trust and communication, limited product assortment to meet shoppers’ changing demand; and lack of data transparency across the supply chain, including control of customer data skewed to retailers,” Coresight Research found.
Where good intentions have existed, the mechanisms for data sharing have historically fallen short. Workflows that rely on database queries and file-sharing via email and spreadsheets have proved to be clumsy and time-consuming. There are far too many opportunities for error. Even accurate data can arrive too late to be actionable.
Autonomous Access
Trade Promotion effectiveness and joint planning efficiency are crucial for both winning more of shoppers’ share-of-wallet and meeting brands’ market share objectives. A state-of-the-art Trade Collaboration solution allows for easier negotiation and accurate execution of deals that produce results.
Retailers rely upon their suppliers’ active cooperation to present options across many categories, and they reason it is OK to ask them to cover a fair share of the cost of more transparent access and improved functionality. Enabling supplier participation using a platform or portal “democratizes” data and enables superior promotion planning and deal negotiation.
Modern trade promotion planning is conducted within a secure digital environment that allows rights-based autonomous access to subscribers. Brand marketers gain appropriate autonomous access to category and first-party data the retailer host provides to inform the planning process. They submit candidate promotions, receive retailer feedback and negotiate binding deals within the platform.
Counting the Benefits
A self-service data-sharing platform/portal is crucial for modern trade promotion planning and negotiation to satisfy deal management requirements across both store and digital channels. DemandTec’s solution, the most widely deployed trade planning platform in the industry, consistently delivers workflow benefits and outcomes that are familiar to many brands and retailers:
- Autonomous access to insights. Self-service access for suppliers, with a familiar, standardized user experience around data access and analytics.
- Agreement on the facts. One set of category, shopper and promotion performance data that originates with the retailer.
- Accurate and speedy decisions. Less error-prone, less time spent hunting for the data and insights essential to informed deal creation and negotiation of binding contracts with trading partners. Automatically create promotions for evaluation based on vendor offers, saving significant time in the promotional planning process.
- Timely measurement. Promotion outcomes can be monitored and analyzed in real time to apply performance results as early as the next decision cycle.
- Equitable sharing of costs. Brand marketers subscribe at a level that is proportional to their business needs.
- Longer view of past deal performance. Up to seven years of historical promotion data are stored and referenceable in the system, enabling deeper planning insights.
- Superior compliance. Dramatically, fewer audits can eliminate most third-party costs while streamlining and automating the burdensome process to deliver rapid ROI, clean auditability, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
- Optimization built-in. Integrated with the DemandTec pricing optimization engine that enables science-based forecasting. With available Autonomous Promotions integration, retailers can seamlessly move from the right deal to the right promotion to promotion execution for true end-to-end promotion optimization.
Streamline Processes to Increase Margins
A collaboration solution for trade promotion planning can deliver a competitive advantage by aligning both trading partners around a methodology to drive profitable deals at pace and with high confidence and trust.
It should provide process speed and flexibility so a retailer or brand is less likely to feel compelled to repeat the deal of a year ago simply. This benefits all parties as it drives the opportunity for greater relevance and effectiveness of the promotional event.
The platform should ensure every deal is correctly aligned with a retailer’s promotional calendar, key events, and category plans. Eliminates the need for stand-alone deal sheets that are so often prone to error, including payment errors and delays that hurt the bottom line.
Future-proof your promotion, democratize data and set the stage for more refinements to come.
Used by over 30,000 retailer and vendors users, the DemandTec Trade Collaboration Network efficiently and accurately manages offers, negotiations and promotions.
