For each promotional event, the Marketing department and Purchase department work closely during all the steps of this process.

The Marketing department define the strategy and the promotional event objectives based on the global objective given by the Finance department during the Plan building.

The Marketing department will then identify needed products for the Promotional event and will work with the Purchase department for the research of products.

The Marketing will then work on every angles of a product to satisfy the objectives (find the right price and right price discount to meet the sales and margin objectives), the providers (find the right quantity to get some discounts), the stores (find the right products with all characteristics that will push the store to order) and finally the customers (find the right products, right prices, define the right information that will push the clients to buy).

PROMOTIONAL EVENT MANAGEMENT

Historical Analysis
As it was done for the Plan, it is necessary to analyse the history of a promotional event and its results. This step enables to identify the best promotional event in terms of sales, margin and best products sold.

ibs Promotions can provide various reports dedicated to each specific need of the different internal actors of the retailers

• Past 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)
• Competitors Analysis
  • Sales and promotional strategies 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)

Event and Supporting Media Definition
The Marketing team will then work on each promotional event specifically. ibs Promotions provides to each team involved in the promotional event process the information defined at the level of the plan. Indeed, the Marketing Team receives the objectives and budget for the promotional event from the Finance department.

Then they receive the general information for each promotional event defined at the plan level: duration of the event, stores that will be part of the promotion and product hierarchy at a macro level.

The Marketing Team also visualizes the different supporting media for each promotional event: Flyer, Radio / TV Spot, Mailing (paper, email, SMS), billboard campaign (Kakemono), catalogue (to inform massively)

“ibs promotions manages different media types, according to your needs…”

Promotional Event Strategy
Once the Event is created, the Marketing team defines deeper information:

• Theme of the promotional Event
• Targeted customers
• Product hierarchy
• Products and Unit Needs (product which is not yet existing in the referential of the retailer but that is needed and may be defined by a small or very detailed description)
• Type of discount applied

ibs Promotions is able to support all these kind of information and they can be used to update every team of the promotion, establish constraints in the system to users with a limited access to some part of the promotion and generate reports based on various criteria.

Supporting Media Strategy
Once the Media is determined, the Marketing team focuses on deeper details and defines different information:

• For the Printed Media as Flyer
  • Version of Flyer are defined and can be stored
  • Pages are allocated to dedicated team (Purchasing Team will receive a certain number of pages and could only allocate products on these pages)
• For non printed media
  • Duration and date of the spot

TEAM ORGANISATION

Definition of deadlines
Our solution ibs Promotions allows setting deadlines, for each task to be accomplished and, to have a promotional event ready on time: it will define the who does what and when (tasks, actors and deadline date definition).

The deadline plan allows each actor to have a clear and synthetic view of the steps related to the promotional event and distributes tasks to different actors.

The deadlines may determine for example: when the product selection must be done, the product pricing should be determined and, when the information should be sent to the Ad Agency to build. Moreover, each deadline can be defined by level of product hierarchy. For example, for new technology items (ex: iphone), lead-time is very short, the Team responsible for this kind of products won't have the same deadlines as team in charge of standard product (ex: tea). Research of products and product allocation will be the nearest from the promotion event start date for an "iPhone" whereas a product like the tea can be managed before (as not submitted to the market innovation).

“ability to define tasks and actors, based on retro-planning template, in order to generate alerts.”

Workflow and Reporting
ibs Promotions is supported by the Workflow and the Reporting modules. The different actors involved in the event creation, including Marketing and Buyers, will be alerted in real time of the different tasks they have to perform. (ex: the Marketing can receive every week by workflow a report on the progress of allocated spaces for a flyer). ibs Promotions will contribute to improve the communication of different actors and the information sharing to everyone.

Validation Cycle
ibs Promotions process is supported by a validation cycle. This is configurable through ibs System and can be adopted by any organization, department and users. It can be used by example for the validation of the product (between the Marketing department and the Purchase department) or the price

Management of Late Change
The Retail World is unstable. Everytime something is validated, the information may change (a validated product may be out of stock one month before the beginning of the promotional event; a cost may be changed and impact the validated price). ibs Promotions is able to handle this, with its "late change" functionality.

Reporting

“analysis and advanced reports for a better planning”

The reports of ibs Promotions will enable the user to:

• Analyse past Promotional Event
• Follow current Promotional Event
• Build future Promotional Event

Marketing and top executives get some help for the decision-making and the activity piloting, thanks to various Promotion follow up, performance reports and gap analysis. Some KPIs and indicators reports are available to monitor:

• The Promotional Budget
• The Media Expenses: Supplier Cooperation, Distributor contribution
• The Promotional Event results (financial performance, margins, sales…)
• The synthesis of products remaining to be allocated on the flyer
• The non-compliance with milestones of the promotional event