A co-op formed by leading regional supermarket retailers (their combined sales would make them one of the top 5 supermarket chains in the US) to leverage their collective buying power expanded into coordinating trade promotions between its members and national brands. E.g., in exchange for the members coordinating promotions of a national soft drink, they would receive preferential pricing and added support to execute the promotions.
Diverse promotion ideas were generated by both the retailers and national manufacturers, and the challenge was to co-ordinate communication of the promotion ideas among all stakeholders (usually 45 or individuals per promotion, 300+ total), gather reactions to the promotion ideas, track willingness to participate, go/no go decisions, specific commitments, reminders about commitments and execution against those commitments. We built a custom trade promotion management system that did all of that on AKTAV with portals for each of the co-op members (30+) and for each of the national brands that participated (75+) that co-operatively did over 500 promotions per year at over 1000 stores.
Initially, spreadsheets were enough to manage the program, but with the growth in the number of members and brands wanting to participate, the spreadsheet system couldn’t scale to keep track of the quickly growing number and variety of promotions. Also, a more analytical approach (e.g., what promotions worked and where) would be difficult if not impossible without a more flexible structure.
Working with all the stakeholders, we designed, built and supported a custom system that had an umbrella workflow, yet was flexible within each step and was customized to every Member and Brand with their own portal so that:
The client could create and send out surveys to each member to gauge interest in types of promotions or specific components of promotions
Brands could propose a promotion through their own portal and the members that it was offered to. They could also upload any associated selling materials (e.g., presentations, images, ads, etc.) and tie them to the promotion. The portal had to handle the myriad promotion types and the creativity of brands in proposing new types of promotions
Once proposed, if a member was offered a promotion, the member could view the promotion in their personalized portal and either request more information, offer modifications, accept the promotion as is or turn down the promotion. If suggested modifications were accepted by the brand, they could update the promotion through the portal and members could review them again
Once all the offered members had responded with either a final acceptance or rejection, a client manager with responsibility for the promotion would accept or reject the promotion for the Co-Op through their own personalized portal, and each member that had accepted the promotion would be notified of the acceptance
The system would then track the execution of the promotion. Sales by member would be entered into the system by brands through their portal. The information was analyzed by the client to identify successes and failures to improve the quality and execution of promotions in the future
Stakeholders could communicate with each other directly using email lists in the system
All stakeholders had a personalized dashboard with status, to do lists with deadlines, links to materials, announcements, etc.
The most popular report was a personalized email sent to every person in the system (over 200 unique emails) every Tuesday morning with the status of each relevant promotion, a to do list specific to the recipient for each relevant promotion and the results of any recently completed promotions. The emails went out at 2:00AM, and, if, for some reason, they weren’t sent out, by 6:00AM we would receive multiple calls asking about them.
The system was successful in managing thousands of promotions.