Trade Promotion Excellence

Converting complexity into actionable and clear insights

Rethinking your trade spend to maximize ROI

Consumer packaged goods companies spend billions annually on trade promotion, and pressure from retailers, competitors, and consumers is increasing. A survey by Strategy& revealed that 85% of CPG companies struggle with overspending and ineffective trade management and, despite the significant value being invested, they often do not fully understand how to maximise their ROI.

At Strategy&, our dedicated TPE team brings significant practical experience and expertise to help consumer products companies improve their trade operations. We work shoulder-to-shoulder with you to deliver practical solutions like Performance Analyzer, a PwC product, which is designed to improve the ROI of your trade spend while creating enduring competitive advantage. It is not unusual for our clients to realize a 5% to 20% improvement in annual profits within one to two years of program launch.

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Why Strategy&?

Strategy& has a long history of helping its clients transform their trade promotion capabilities. We have achieved tangible results for consumer goods companies across all major segments including food, beverage, consumer healthcare, and household non-durables — several with more $1 billion in annual trade spending.

We work closely with the major TPM software providers to help advance our clients’ agendas, and have also developed a proprietary analytics platform, the PwC Performance Analyzer, which supports our clients’ revenue management and profit generation. The senior members of our TPE team have been with Strategy& for at least ten years and each has personally been involved with three to ten major trade programs. This combination of experience and technological expertise positions us to optimize our clients’ use of trade promotions.

What we do for our clients

The five key building blocks of Trade Promotion Excellence

Strategic process

We bring a thorough understanding of best practices, common pitfalls, and benchmarks to help our clients diagnose their existing processes and re-engineer them to be more effective. In many cases, we assist our clients with their thorniest process challenges (e.g., supporting a new funding structure, optimizing new product introductions, and aligning planning to customer calendars).

Organization alignment

We offer an array of services to help leading corporations identify, diagnose, and remedy common organizational "roadblocks" to effective execution. We have extensive experience helping organizations achieve their objectives, whether enlightening management, transforming staff capabilities, or motivating major change.

Analytics

We have developed our own enterprise-grade analytics platform called PwC’s Performance Analyzer to fill a void in advanced revenue management and trade analytics. It helps our clients achieve year-over-year profit improvements from trade as well as address other struggles they face with revenue management. In addition, we have extensive experience building sophisticated scan- and shipment-based predictive models that underpin most analytical planning and post-event analysis systems.

Systems and data

Strategy& has a dedicated team of designers, architects, and developers with extensive experience implementing TPM systems. We work with all the major TPM systems including SAP, CAS, Siebel, Demantra, DemandTec, and MEI.

Transformation leadership

Strategy& brings a powerful combination of senior advisors with extensive experience managing transformations to help steward change programs and specialized change management professionals who can assist with more tactical change efforts (e.g., skill assessments, training programs, communication planning, and more).

Driving profit improvement from trade

A large packaged foods company retained Strategy& to help transform its business. A key goal of this engagement was to drive $100 million in profit improvement from its trade investment, which represented its second biggest line item behind cost of goods sold. Strategy& ran a capability diagnostic and provided a detailed roadmap. We helped the company drive a "zero loss mindset to analyzing trade spend," a new way of managing trade spend as described by the company’s CEO, identifying more than $25 million in profit improvement and building capabilities to realize the full $100 million of profit improvement.

 

Improving decision-making processes and optimising efficiency

A large consumer goods company was facing productivity and decision-making challenges, related to inconsistent processes, inefficient planning tools, seasonality of the business, and insufficient data. Strategy& helped drive a trade transformation by assessing core capabilities, supporting key design decisions and change management, and implementing the SAP trade solution. Our work resulted in enhanced customer investment decisions using market data such as POS, IRI, and Spin. Additionally, the centralisation of fit-for purpose planning in a single system enabled easy-to-use predictive analytics and scenario planning, leading to optimised customer planning and management.

Contact us

Hans K. Van Delden

Hans K. Van Delden

Principal, Strategy& US

David Ganiear

David Ganiear

Principal, Strategy& US

Alex Kushnir

Alex Kushnir

Principal, Strategy& US

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