Consumer Goods Technology - October 2018 - 19

Ability to Achieve Objectives
How often do your trade promotions
achieve the overall objectives set by the planner?

Impact of Outside Data on Trade Performance
Which data elements would be most effective
for optimizing and predicting promotion ROI?

FI G U RE 1 1 :

50%-75% of promotions

30%
27%

Don't know
18%

75%-90%

9%

Impact of CP Alignment on Trade Performance
How would integrating consumer promotion data into
planning intelligence impact the ROI of your trade promotion?

F I G U RE 1 2 :

24%
Dramatically
increase

12%
Wouldn't make
much difference
increase

6%
It could
potentially
decrease
ROI

3%
Corporate PR
campaigns
15%
Social media
sentiment analysis
18%
Corporate
and/or regional
advertising media
schedules

15%

50%-75%
More than 90%

F I G U R E 13:

58%
Marginally
increase

most commonly available, especially for large retailers such as
Walmart, Target and Kroger. Confirming our suspicions, corporate
direct-to-consumer marketing promotions and events data
were selected by nearly one-third of respondents, indicating the
increasing role this data plays in aligning trade with other activity.
Sell-in data (past volume and revenues generated from
promotions) is usually considered part of the historical, but we
chose to separate it because many CPGs don't have strong, detailed
performance data (like tactics, timing, products/promoted
groups, individual costs, settlement amounts). A healthy portion
of respondents listed this as a major data source for promotion
optimization. The lesson here is to ensure that sufficient data
sources exist to provide a broad and accurate sampling of data to
fuel effective predictive analysis.
Elsewhere, many respondents indicate that digital CP results
(mobile, SMS, online) are the most important data additions to
TPO (Figure 13). Advertising continues to play a huge role in
consumer engagement for CPGs, and aligning those schedules and

64%
Digital consumer
promotion
(online, mobile,
SMS)

event calendars with the trade calendar is a critical requirement
for improving performance and avoiding channel conflict. Social
sentiment also is a powerful tool, used in a real-time scenario to
gauge the consumer environment and either leverage a positive
sentiment about a product or company or avoid spending money
in a negative environment.
Specific to impacting ROI, more than half of respondents say
consumer promotion data will marginally increase ROI, but
another quarter believe it will drive a dramatic increase (Figure 12).
On that topic, most respondents feel that their trade promotion
activity is at least "sometimes" aligned (Figure 5). This is
surprising, since we continually see traditional information and
communication barriers between marketing and sales inhibiting
effective integration into the trade planning process.
What we are seeing is an encouraging trend among TPx vendors
to enable some degree of integration between the marketing and
trade calendars.

Making Progress
About one-fourth of respondents say their promotions meet
objectives more than 75% of the time. Sadly, the same percentage
don't even know how well their promotions do, as they have no
visibility into performance (Figure 11). More open collaboration
with retailers is key to fixing this.
Overall, the survey illustrates considerable progress being made
toward more effective trade promotion management and execution.
With the advent of increasingly sophisticated technology and
tools, today's CPGs are able to collect and synthesize critical data
sets, revealing insights and actionable information never before
possible. They can overcome the historical challenges inherent
in measuring effectiveness and embark on a new future where
the significant investments in trade promotion can be effectively
measured and managed - and ultimately will translate into a
positive impact on the company's bottom line. CGT

CONSUMERGOODS.COM | OCTOBER 2018 | CGT

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Consumer Goods Technology - October 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Consumer Goods Technology - October 2018
