I saw Lou Reed, the 60’s rock icon, in concert at a little club in Asheville the other night. (If you are interested, a review is posted on my personal blog site www.rectorsite.com.) It got me thinking of the saying “everything old is new again.”
TPM has become more complicated and expensive over the decades. We have all followed the market toward more complex and convoluted efforts toward supporting our products. Not all of it is bad, but it’s time to take stock, and attempt to get back to basics in your Trade Promotion Management strategy.
“PROMOTION” is one of the infamous FOUR P’s of MARKETING: Product, Promotion, Price, and Place. Furthermore, it involves the “…dissemination of information about a product or brand, with the intent of increasing sales, new product acceptance, creation of brand equity, or competitive price reaction.”
In my continuing screed to address the challenges of the current economy, operators need simple price supports combined with executable traffic-building ideas to help them justify continued purchases of your product. Almost everything else in your trade promotion arsenal (growth incentives, points programs, volume purchasing allowances, etc.) will not address these short-term issues.
So GBTB (Get Back To Basics) and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) should guide your short-term product support plans. And most importantly, EVALUATE the results of your efforts, so you can expand promotions that work, and abandon plans that don’t. That’s what TPM was originally meant to be.
"There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." --Peter F. Drucker