An Efficient Promotional Planner

ibs Promotions organizes the full promotional activity of the Retailers. Every year, Retailers are preparing the coming promotional activity. ibs Promotions helps them to define each component of this through the plan definition, the promotional event definition, the product content management and the related communication definition.communication definition.

ibs Promotions is a Solution that supports the full organization of all tasks of each actors participating to the promotional activity: this solution groups internal actors (such as Finance Department, Marketing Department, Supply Chain Department, Purchase Department and Category Department) and external actors (Suppliers, Ad Agency, Printers, Distributors).

During the plan definition process, different tasks will be done. First, the retailers take into account the past promotional activity with an internal analysis (promotion done by the Retailer) and an external analysis (promotion done by the competitor and global market trends analysis).
Once this analysis is achieved, the Executive Team defines global objectives and budget and may allocate these objectives and budget by different axes (ex: promotional events, stores, calendar and, product hierarchy). According to the objectives and budget, the marketing team define the different Promotional Events composing the promotional plan and related supporting Media.

PROMOTION ANALYSIS

Internal analysis
Analyse history is one of the first step to build the coming promotional plan. Deloitte and Touch reports that by identifying and incorporating measurements at the planning stages of a promotional campaign (plan), retailers can achieve:

  • Savings of 7-20%
  • Boosting sales by 2-4%
  • Improving overall sales margin by 1-2%

Analysing the past provides a clear vision of the internal and external promotional activity and provides metrics that will be used in the definition of objectives and budget. Our Solution, ibs Promotions, allows retailers to manage this analysis and provides various reports dedicated to each specific need of the different internal actors of the Retailers.

Below are some examples of reports and metrics that ibs Promotions is able to provide to support the different analysis and realize comparisons over several years:

  • Past Promotion Plan Analysis
    • Margin and sales plan analysis
    • Results progress (between Y-1 and Y : margin, sales…)
    • Return on Investment
    • Banner strategy
    • Number of promotional events and duration
    • Number of supporting media
  • Promotional Event Analysis
    • Events performance (by theme, products, discount type, period, by supporting media)
    • Margin and sales events analysis
    • Return on Investment
    • Item analysis (Halo and cannibalization effect, Pantry Loading Effect, Tops and Flops, Discount impact…)

External analysis

  • Competitors Analysis
    • Sales and promotional strategies analysis
    • Promotional activities analysis
      • Theme of the event
      • Frequency of the created events
      • Period of each event
      • Calendar events analysis (ex: auto racing, Back to school, Mother day…)
  • Items Analysis
    • Promotional offers types (BOGO, Simple…)
    • Promotional implementation in stores
  • Media Analysis
    • Choice of the media supports
    • Period of each media
  • Flyer Analysis if printed media
    • Format (version)
    • Number of pages
    • Pages allocations (items)

OBJECTIVES AND BUDGET DEFINITION

After the history analysis, the retailers (in particular, the Finance Department) define, at the level of the Plan objectives and budget:

  • Objectives(financial goals of the promotion) in terms of Sales, Margin, Products performance
  • Budget(budget for the promotional event): Human Resources (internal and external), Supplier funds, Media creation through an Ad Agency, Flyer Distribution

These objectives give the input to the Marketing Department and Purchase Department.

“choice of the right product to be promoted that will generate enough sales and margin.”

ibs Promotions is able to fit any type of retailer organization (Centralized, Local, Mixed). Objectives and Budget can be defined at the plan level and then be allocated at promotional event level, team, product hierarchy, stores level (Top Down definition). Objectives and Budget can also be consolidated to the higher level (Bottom-Up way).

ibs Promotions enables the monitoring of the objectives and budget indicators.After the beginning of the promotional activity, the retailer will continue to analyse the objectives and budget and may do a roll up to check if the objectives are met. In this case, the retailer will be able to decide if these indicators need to be reviewed. The correction of the indicators (for example, increase budget, decrease objectives) or the promotional activity (creation of additional promotional events or additional supporting media) may be done.

PROMOTIONAL ACTIVITY DEFINITION

After the analysis of the past promotion, objectives and budget definition, the retailers can define the promotional activity of the year. ibs Promotions enables to create any components needed when creating the promotional activity (plan, promotional event, media).

The Marketing Department is able to manage different levels of information to define the Promotional Activity:

  • Definition of the duration for each component
  • Definition of the product hierarchy
  • Definition of the Stores or Store List (group of stores as a faster way for store selection) that will participate to the promotion

For example, one plan can be defined for one year in the traditional retail or on 6 months for the mail order retail. This Plan can be used for all products or a subset of products. In the same way, all the national market of the retailer may participate or only a region. Then, several promotional events can be defined in mass with supported media. Ex: 52 promotional events, one by week, can be part of the Plan and with a printed flyer for each promotional event. Each Promotional event can have a subset of products, a subset of stores and a different duration according to the store where the promotional event will occur. ibs Promotions is a flexible solution, able to address any retailer's organisation and evolves with any change in it. The promotional plan is able to respond to multi-format, multi banners and multi channel needs.

ibs Promotions includes many functionalities dedicated to reduce the time in the operational work and save this time in the analysis needed for the decisions. Among these functionalities, our Solution allows duplicating plan and promotional events and enables to work by exception.

ibs Promotions enables also the storage of various templates (example: flyer templates, page templates) to save time with the flyer building.

ibs Promotions is able to fit the retailer organization with the communication of the information coming from the Headquarter to the Stores and also to gather information from the Store going to the Headquarter.

This process is particularly used during:

  • Objectives Definition
  • Promotional Event Suggestion to Stores
  • Product Suggestion
  • Flyer Content