Take Control with True Omnichannel Promotion Execution

by [Ursula Brady](/content/author/ubrady/ "Posts by Ursula Brady"/index.html) | Jul 6, 2022 | Blog Post, Webinar

New Levels of Industry Disruption

Record levels of inflation, supply chain upheavals, ever-rising regulations and rapidly evolving consumer expectations are creating route-to-market challenges like never before. The unpredictability of these factors, coupled with the constant development of industry competitors, are redefining how Consumer Goods (CG) companies need to operate.

CG businesses must be prepared to rapidly adapt their strategies and operations to contend with these factors. It has never been more critical to ensure essential brands are available through the right channels and at the right price.

Consumer behaviour is actively being impacted by industry conditions. As prices rise to contend with a difficult market, consumer spend will decrease and promotions will become even more attractive. The Consumer Goods Technology graphics below illustrate the increased consumer awareness of price hikes, particularly in the food industry, and predicts that 28% will be actively looking for promotions.

The businesses able to absorb price increases, instead of passing them on to these cost-conscious consumers, will see greater success in maintaining brand loyalty and rate of sale. In these turbulent times for the industry, losing market share to cheaper, ‘budget’-branded products or more effective promotions could be devastating.

“Most consumers intend to reduce their product spending during the next three to six months, and brands are being challenged to ensure their promotions are hitting the mark.”
Lisa Johnston
Senior Editor, Consumer Goods Technology

Industry and global events must not be allowed to lead and dictate the actions taken by your business. While certain areas of most businesses will inevitably feel the impact of such events, steps can and should be taken to minimize their effects. For example, although supply shortages are likely to occur, they don’t automatically have to translate over to price rises for the consumer. It’s possible to approach potential fallout strategically and find other avenues to grow; consider, for example, shrinkflation or launching and making intentional, segmented promotions.

The number of tools, tactics, and data processes available to navigate the complexity of the Consumer Goods industry can be quite frankly, overwhelming.

How Can Aforza Help?

Aforza cuts through the noise of all these assorted tools. As opposed to operating across siloed, disconnected platforms that require time and effort to switch between, take control on a singular, omnichannel application.

Creating a consistent commercial experience, both for your customers and employees, is key to combating the potential pitfalls highlighted above. Implement Aforza and take control with these three strategies:

1. Understand and Get Ahead of Market Events Before They Become an Issue

Preparation is key to ensuring that you can be proactive, instead of reactive, when market events arise. If you’re proactive, you can take an event and make the situation work for you instead of reactively scrambling to create a strategy.

So, when you see rising prices in materials, cost of living and inflationary pressures, it can be the easier and more reactive solution to pass these costs directly onto the consumer. But, if you have understood the commercial landscape and readied a strategy, you may be able to turn your insight into an advantage.

2. Rapidly Put Sales and Promotion Strategies in Place to Address These Events

Aforza enables rapid deployment of sales and promotion strategies to support the insights gathered by your teams.

Some of the key capabilities that fulfill this are:

• Real-time insights, pulled from a range of commercial data sources, that allow you to optimize strategies based on your business goals and current supply and promotion constraints. This allows you to maximize the value of every dollar invested in trade promotions.
• Rich, interactive reports and chart visuals make this insight highly actionable, so changes can be made in real-time. Users can seamlessly drill down from the insight into related records.
• A Powerful Promotion Planning Dashboard allows you to target the right customers by sharing a real-time view into promotion performance, inventory levels, sales order insights, budgets & funds, plans and objectives.
• Granular Promotion Insights that provide a real-time view into how a single promotion is performing, including individual SKU performance within the promotion, promotion performance over time, and overall promotion profit & loss. This supports real-time in-flight changes to promotions to maximize their effectiveness.

3. Execute Consistently Across Every Channel (Field, Mobile Offline, Telesales, E-commerce)

Ensure your products and promotions get in front of the right customers, in the right outlets, through the right channels. With the number of companies investing in their omnichannel experiences having risen exponentially from 20% to over 80%, competitive movements in this area are vital.

With Aforza, you can easily plan, promote, visit, sell and deliver across every channel. Counteract the impact of external market events with the ability to be both flexible and consistent.

Learn more about how leading CPG companies are taking control of external events with true omnichannel sales and promotion execution to differentiate their brands and unlock revenue potential like never before.