For consumer products companies, approximately 60% of trade promotion activities don’t break even according to a Nielsen study. As industry trends continue to demand greater cost efficiencies from CPG manufacturers, this dearth of trade promotion effectiveness must be addressed to compete in the modern market landscape. Effectively addressing this inequity in spend and return first requires a robust trade promotion assessment, one highlighting the gaps in a businesses’ trade strategies, processes, and technologies against industry benchmarks in order to determine the path forward for evolving trade capabilities and outcomes.

This client is a subsidiary of a global food conglomerate and provides core ingredients for baking and cooking with brands that are either #1 or #2 in their categories in retail and foodservice across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Owing to acquisition, the client operated with inefficient processes and multiple, disconnected systems pieced together across different regions and business entities, impacting both visibility and productivity of trade investment.

With over 4,000 SKUs and ever-increasing trade spend dominating the budget, the client wished to not only optimize trade processes for bottom-line improvements but create a sustainable platform for future growth and innovation in trade promotion management.

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The client engaged Clarkston to help them understand how to become aligned with industry leading practices and define a roadmap to modernize. Clarkston, leveraging distinguished industry expertise and recognized leadership in trade promotion and revenue growth management, partnered with the client to conduct a robust assessment of the state of trade in the industry and the client’s business, identify the potential opportunities for improvement, and select a trade promotion tool that would enable transformation for the organization.

Primary Objectives

Upon completion of the project, Clarkston and the client sought to create:

• Analysis and documentation of the client’s current trade promotion management processes and systems, including the financial oversight and reporting areas.
• Identification of process improvement opportunities based on pain points, gaps, and inefficiencies using industry leading practices.
• Processes that ensure the ongoing maintenance of global training materials while supporting consistent and efficient delivery of training.
• A mechanism to provide visibility to local, site-specific training materials to influence consistency in development and encourage the leveraging of existing training materials where possible.

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