Trade Promotion Management

The Accelerated Analytics team had the pleasure of attending the TPMA show in Chicago last week, as well as presenting a keynote presentation on POS data analysis.

Some interesting facts about trade promotion:

53% of companies do not know if their promotions make money

50% of companies do not know if the promotions they run add incremental value to the brand

51% of companies have not implemented changes to their trade promotion programs in light of new Sarbanes-Oxley and FASB regulations

It was clear as we spoke to manufactures at the show that they are struggling with POS data. Most of the manufacturers we spoke to are still using Excel as their primary tool. This creates a number of issues as the volume of data grows and the source data files come in various formats. It is abundantly clear a more robust POS data analysis tool like Accelerated Analytics is needed by a majority of manufacturers. It was interesting, this is true of both large and small manufacturers we spoke to. This is because in most cases, POS data analysis is a line of business issue and is not supported by the IT function. Most manufacturers we spoke to are looking for an outsourced service to handle the data. They don't want to invest into hardware and software that will become a growing expense over time. They also do not want to mess with the data integration issues.