4-Cs Series: Customizing Sales & Marketing Guidance with Micromarket Precision

What marketing decisions are most critical for your organization?  Are these priorities predictable or do they fluctuate with day-to-day changes in your market?  Do you have the right data, tools and support systems at hand to make the best decisions on an ongoing basis?  Is your organization wired to optimally deploy these tools to enable different organizational silos with access to  a common view of your demand environment?

Unique challenges require customized solutions

Increasingly, sales & marketing decision makers find themselves in need of highly customized solutions to the problems that are specific to their organizations and their place in the value chain.  Manufacturers of food and beverage products may primarily be concerned with making more productive trade spend decisions, while CPG producers might focus on shoring up brand equity for premium products facing competition from substitute offerings.  Wholesalers may prioritize increasing the value of each transaction basket by inducing customers to purchase products from them that they currently purchase from competitors.  And retailers might want to better understand how their promotional campaigns resonate with target customers and what they can do to earn a better return for each campaign dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

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Crunch the Numbers that Really Matter (hint:they’re the ones that relate to downstream demand)

A New Approach to Trade Spend for Foodservice Manufacturers

There is no shortage of quantitative analysis in the trade spend practices of foodservice manufacturers.  Unfortunately, very little of this analysis helps give decision-makers insights about the effectiveness of their trade spend programs.  The numbers being crunched do not relate to signals about actual downstream demand, but rather to the formidable mountain of claims from their distributors.  These claims come in all manner of data formats and accounting entries and it typically takes armies of brokers, salespeople and financial staff to figure them out.  After all the cumbersome and error-prone line-by-line calculations to validate claims are said and done, you are no more informed about the profitability or the potential risks associated with any given program.  No wonder there is widespread dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of these programs.  Over 75% of manufacturers in this sector consider their trade spend initiatives to be inefficient, according to the 2010 MarketIntelligence Foodservice Trade Survey. Read the rest of this entry »

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