Why Promotions Monitoring
In competitive market place, Promotions can disrupt the dynamics the market quite quickly. Promotions are expensive and often involve careful decisions to ensure that promotion spend is targeted at the right market segment- in terms of product or sales micro market etc
Often Promotions when targeted to the incorrect segment fails to deliver returns on investment. What’s more, Market often demands promotions to counter already running Competitor promotions. This makes the timing aspect quite important too.
Another aspect that Marketing Managers strongly desire is understanding the impact of promotion, so the learnings from a past promotion can be channelized into future promotions, and this comes from supporting information before and after promotion such as impact on price, demand from targeted micro markets.
All these factors make Promotion Monitoring a crucial tool for Marketing Managers.
Issues in Promotion Monitoring
Promotion Monitoring is usually a highly unstructured activity because number of intangibles involved. For example, measuring perception, value allocation in terms of per unit of product sold, segregating segregating geographic areas of promotion targets are all at best expensive to measure for each promotion run.
Following are some of the issues of Promotion Monitoring:
- Promotion Types: Promotions are of different kind, for example some that are targeted at end customers, some at the partner/distributor network (incentivization).
- Promotion Scope: Promotions run at different levels, for example a generic brand promotion across a territory vs a targeted promotion in a micro market. In such case, it gets difficult to get a view of running promotions that can impact a micro market.
- Field Information of Duplication: Promotions monitoring often suffers from duplication of information, for example, a single promotion run by a competitor across multiple micro markets may be reported from different micro markets as duplicate information, but must be seen centrally as a single promotion run.
- Real time Monitoring: Promotions often require quick reaction to mitigate any negative effects, hence near real time information on promotions is often useful.
- Single View Challenges: Promotions need to be monitored across the territory for all competitors in a single view. It is sometimes crucial to get a single view of running promotions for all competitors and your own brands to make decisions. The nature of promotions data makes it a challenging exercise.
- Manual workflows: Promotions need to be calibrated to understand the cost allocation to per unit of product sold. This often requires manual intervention before data is considered for processing, hence sales organization sensitive workflow is often needed.
- Action- Launch Promotions: Promotions Monitoring requires decision making tools to launch counter promotions or alter running promotions in near real time and propagate these to field.
- Promotion Effectiveness Measurement: Promotions impact assessment is a key capability that is often required without which Promotion Monitoring can at best be used only as a support tool. The impact may need to be measured in terms of Promotion impact on demand or prices or both. The tooling must support this capability.
- Changes Monitoring during run: Promotions when launched are run with certain terms and duration. However these are often changed during the run, such as extension. Promotion monitoring must accommodate possibilities of incorporating changes on running promotions.
Our Solution
Our Market Intelligence Solution Outreach addresses most of the issues with Promotion Monitoring as including below detail.
Manage any promotion uniquely:
- Outreach incorporates a mechanism to de-duplicate multiple promotion information, and searching abilities including by promotion type, thus enabling a quick scan and analysis of running promotions or even planned promotions. Thus enabling an effective decision making for use of your promotion budgets. Hence even if a multi territory promotion is reported from different field staff, Outreach provides mechanisms to identify these as a single unique promotion.
Manual Calibration:
- Often it is useful to Manually calibrate promotions before accepting these for processing, Outreach provides for location sensitive (I.e. Sales Manager for appropriate territory is involved) manual workflow before promotions are accepted for processing.
Promotions in a single view:
- Outreach queries and report provide ample options to view various promotions, yours and competitors in a single view.
Measuring Promotion Impact:
- Outreach incorporates unique features that provide micro market level view of promotion impact in terms of price and/or demand changes. Thus Outreach is an effective tool for learning over a period of time, how promotions of different kinds impact the market
Manage promotion updates:
- It is important to track promotion updates, ending and new launches to make effective decisions on optimal promotion spend. Outreach provides support for managing promotion start, end and updates for effective decision making on promotions. Thus same promotion can be updated, extended or terminated early.