Promotional Planning & Trade Spend Optimisation

Stop rolling last year’s promotional plan forward

Measure what works: assess promotional effectiveness instead of tweaking last year’s plan.
Predict and optimise: forecast volume, revenue and margin, then optimise the whole program against trading terms and market share objectives.
One shared system: replace spreadsheets with slotting boards, forward plans and dashboards.

Considering that trade spend accounts for almost 25% of the marketing budget for consumer product companies, and 20% of revenue for FMCG companies, it's critical to optimise retail promotional activities and trade spend allocation. And yet, despite this enormous level of investment, most manufacturers and retailers don't optimise their trade spend or even measure their promotional effectiveness. In most cases, the common practice is to take last year’s promotion plans and tweak them without identifying ways to improve or optimise, and at times trying to force old plans to solve new problems.

Due to the inherent complexity of the process, most companies use home-grown spreadsheets and ad-hoc reports for promotion planning and trade spend allocation, resulting in common problems such as:

Manual handling and manipulation of data from a variety of sources, leading to data integrity issues and substantial time inefficiencies
Significant time, expertise, and labour required to analyse just a few scenarios and determine their effectiveness, making it impractical to conduct a comprehensive analysis to find a truly optimised plan or allocation
No way to generate optimised promotional plans that maximise category growth and product penetration
Limited ability to predict volume and margin within markets
Untapped competitor data that is difficult to collect and put to use
Little visibility of promotional effectiveness, with no reliable way to measure the impact of promotional activities

We can help you address these commonplace problems through Complexica's Promotional Campaign Manager (PCM), which provides robust and easy-to-use planning, analysis, prediction, and optimisation capabilities. Apart from increasing product visibility and raising brand awareness, PCM can help your business grow a category and differentiate a product.

Based on sophisticated models that consider promotional lift, advanced price elasticity and cannibalisation modelling across segments, our robust and easy-to-use Promotional Campaign Manager (PCM) can help you:

Assess promotional effectiveness and move away from the common practice of taking last year's plan and tweaking it
Enable what-if simulation to automate the exploration of a large number of scenarios
Enable predictive capabilities to forecast and measure the value of plans based on volume, revenue, and margin predictions
Enable optimisation capabilities to run optimisation algorithms across a promotional program, whilst considering various constraints and objectives (e.g. trading terms constraints, market share objectives, etc).
Automate data loading and manipulation and replace home-grown spreadsheets with a cloud-based system that provides multi-user access to centralised slotting boards, forward plans, and dashboard analytics

To learn more about promotional planning and pricing optimisation, please watch our video from Chapter 3 of The Rise of Artificial Intelligence