Supercharge Your Trade
Promotions With Data
VIEWPOINT
Consider the following statements, and ask yourself whether your organization would label each as “true” or “false”:

We abandoned our Excel spreadsheets in favor of an integrated trade promotions management tool.

We have a solid grasp of the return on investment from our trade promotions.

We plan our trade promotions together with our retail partners for maximum optimization and efficiency.

Our trade promotions are always based on data – not on gut feelings or general expectations.

Our sales reps can access real-time data in the field that helps them track and manage promotions.

The promotions we offer are not broad – they are tailored to the specific customer and the specific brand / product.

We can target consumers with individualized promotions while they are in a retail store.

Our trade promotion strategy adapts to new / emerging markets quickly.
Although the term “big data” is being applied to everything
from marketing to scientific research to crime fighting,
account managers at CPGs are often faced with a deluge of
data that lead to limited insights due to the lack of sufficient
analytical tools. Instead, the preparation of customer
insights and the ability to respond to assortment planning is
tedious and slow, leading to trade promotion plans created
without knowledge of past performance or reliable
indicators of future success.
At a time when doing “more with less” is the norm, Mindtree
has partnered with leading global CPGs to use data to
streamline and optimize their trade promotions for
maximum revenue / uplift. If you answered “false” to more
than one of the statements above, we encourage you to
keep reading and learn how we can bring your trade
promotion optimization strategy into the era of big data.
The Shifting Landscape of Trade Promotions
In a world where a consumer can use his phone to purchase
an item while sitting on a park bench and have it delivered
to that bench in 40 minutes, it’s clear that “the store” is no
longer a brick and mortar place. Instead, the store is now in
our pockets. It’s also in our televisions, our gaming consoles,
and before long it will be in our refrigerators, our cars, and
so on. In other words, media is the store now.
This phenomenon has put a tremendous amount of pressure
on traditional retailers that sell consumer goods in physical
stores, where “showrooming” has become a threat to
survival. Caught in between are CPGs – who on the one
hand need to maintain trade promotion spending to keep
retailers happy and keep their products on store shelves,
but on the other hand have an unprecedented new
opportunity to market directly to consumers outside of the
traditional retail supply chain. Spending trade promotion
budgets wisely within this still-evolving retail landscape is
as uncertain as it is important.
In emerging markets, the situation is even more complex,
because the ability to predict and track the effectiveness of
promotions is further confounded by several other factors: a
much wider array of intermediaries in the supply chain,
unique local tastes and cultural preferences, competition
from entrenched local brands, and far different levels of
affordability and price points. In fact, some emerging
markets can begin to instead look like many ‘micro-markets.’
And at the consumer level, while there is more choice, there
is also a lot more “noise” – a massive proliferation of
promotions, advertisements, content marketing and social
media – much of it untargeted and ultimately ignored.
Smart Promotional Spend
The key to success lies in harnessing the wealth of data
available to CPGs and using it to make fast, smart decisions
that drive profitable growth. With robust tools for trade
promotion optimization (TPO) and trade promotion
analytics (TPA) consumer goods companies can cut back
on guesswork and plan their trade spend correctly from
the start, while significantly speeding up their ability to
react to changes in the marketplace.
As we have shown through partnerships with some of the
world’s largest CPGs, the days of putting a plan into place
and waiting for quarterly or even monthly performance
data are over. Our TPO/TPA tools put the power of
real-time data into handheld devices that sales reps can
use during store visits – for promotion compliance audits,
to eliminate guesswork and improve predictability of
success, drive effective negotiations, and provide a single
integrated view of data across CRM / TPM and other
back-end systems.
This real-time analytics platform allows CPGs to:

view data across geography, customers and brands

respond swiftly to out of stock promotion assortments
via alerts

generate accurate pre-promotion financial prediction
scenarios

measure and monitor financial effectiveness of
promotions over time

compare products and promotions with those of
competitors

analyze sales trends, price association, spend
distribution, and the impact of holidays and external
factors
By layering this framework with Mindtree’s Integrated
Customer Insights solution, CPGs can also get actionable
360-degree information about their end consumers. It’s a
scalable platform that combines consumer data from
multiple sources – social, demographic and transactional –
then analyzes it through custom-built algorithms based on
specific business goals. The result will allow CPG firms
to present targeted offers to consumers at various touch
points, including while they are inside a retail store.
This new capability – context aware offers – can revitalize
retail selling because it can reach the individual shopper
right where the decision is being made, in real time, with
offers that are interesting to that person. This stands in
stark contrast to the relatively untargeted and largely
annoying “noise” that exists today at the individual
shopper level.
Why Work With Mindtree?
With a proven track record of success in working on the
customer and consumer value chain at a very large scale,
across different markets, and with deep understanding of
trade promotion from both the retailer and consumer
perspective, Mindtree brings the technical and business
expertise that will inspire confidence and result in fast,
innovative change. We are experts at building APIs that
consolidate data into user-friendly platforms to give CPGs a
real-time view of their supply chain, and make targeted
offers to consumers at the individual level.
We are agile and tech-agnostic – no matter what
technological infrastructure is already in place, our tools and
our specialists can build a framework that will integrate data
from your system into a coherent platform. If other vendors
are in the mix, you can rest assured that Mindtree works well
in a multi-vendor environment.
Importantly, we don’t consider our solutions to be tools
that you purchase and are left alone to work with. We
remain with you throughout the journey to ensure that
these solutions remain robust, and that your teams are
making the best of them for both short term and long
term success.
Tying it all together – our “secret sauce” – is our famously
collaborative culture. This is our true hallmark. When you
partner with us, you will know that you’re getting an
extreme amount of attention from our top leadership to
ensure success, and the attention to creating a positive,
collaborative environment with clients and partners is
hard-wired deeply within all of us. It is this value system,
along with our technical expertise, that has earned us
preferred-provider status with some of the premier global
CPGs. For Mindtree, “Welcome to possible” is more than a
slogan – it reflects our approach to every engagement.
Write to us at cpg@mindtree.com to take the first step in
maximizing the return on your promotions.
TPA-TPO Solution Framework
TPM / CRM / ERP
Promotion
Planning
Baseline Sales
Promotion
Monitoring
Budget
Allocation
Strategy
Planning
Analytics and Optimization Suite
KPIs Impacted
Predictive Analytics
Uplift
Attribution
Baseline
Estimation
POS Spend
Mapping
Incremental
Sales / Volume
Forward
buying
Carry Forward
Analysis
Theme Analysis
(text mining)
Return on
Investment
Cannibalization
Analysis
Seasonality
Analysis
Spend Alignment
Analysis
Input Data
% shift in
Baseline
Fund
Allocation
Fair Share
Index
Promo
Optimization
Cannibalized Promo Alignment
Indicator
Volume / value
Tools and Techniques
Shipment Spends
Primary Sales
Promotion Calendar
POS Data
Channel Info
Action Levers
Data Preparation
for Analysis
Modelling
Exploratory Data
Analysis
Algorithm Design
and Evaluation
Model
Validation
About Mindtree
Mindtree [NSE: MINDTREE] delivers technology services and accelerates growth for Global 1000 companies by solving
complex business challenges with breakthrough technical innovations. Mindtree specializes in e-commerce, mobility, cloud
enablement, digital transformation, business intelligence, data analytics, testing, infrastructure, EAI and ERP solutions. We are
www.mindtree.com
©Mindtree 2014