Planning a promotion

Promotions are a crucial part of building successful retailer partnerships and driving sales as a growing brand. But they’re also a CPG company’s biggest expense, which means that how they manage those promotions, and whether they’re profitable, can make or break their business. Most brands have struggled to access the data they need to plan successful promotions, find out if those promotions are attracting new customers, and learn from their trial and error to design future strategies that will work for them, not against them. It’s not easy — which is why 70% of CPG promotions are ineffective.

With access to real-time sales and inventory data, it's easier to design promotions based on your actual sales and distribution trends. You may decide to run a price promotions to help boost your sales in under-performing stores, drive trial of your products, and increase the number of repeat customers. Or you might opt to run display promotions, such as end-of-aisle displays, to maximize sales in high-performing stores or boost sales in underperforming stores. Here, we'll show how you can explore velocity data to determine how your brand might benefit from a promotion, which promotion to run, and how to share those insights with colleagues and retail partners.

Step 1: Use velocity to select products for promotion

To start, let's narrow down the product and retailer where you're considering your promotion. The best way to do this is to dig into your velocity data for a given retailer. Crisp's Velocity Dashboard makes it easy to identify your highest performing or lowest performing products. 

In this case, let's say we want to boost an under-performing product with a price promotion, so we will start by selecting the product with the lowest velocity.


Alternatively, you could identify your two highest-performing products as candidates for a different type of promotion, like a display promotion.

Once you've selected your products based on velocity, you'll want to remember what these baseline velocities were, so that you can also assess the impact of the promotion later on.

Step 2: Narrow your promotion by geography

From here, you'll want to narrow down where you're running your promotion for the given product and retailer. If you're planning a price promotion to boost lower sales performance, you may want to choose states with lower sales, or choose markets that are less familiar with your product. Crisp's Velocity Dashboard has a Units Per Store Per Week by State visualization to help you easily find and filter the regions you want to target for the promotion. In this example, we'll focus on five West Coast states (NM, NV, ID, AZ, and UT). 

Step 3: Share your findings

Now that you've identified your selected retailer, product, and regions, you can get down to an individual store list and then share that with your retail partners to begin executing the promotion. Crisp dashboards offer a Details section, so once you've clicked on the 5 states above, you'll get a complete list of stores in those regions. From there, you have options for how to share this information. You can download the store list from the details section and then send the spreadsheet on to colleagues, brokers, and buyers. You can also save your entire Velocity report with the selected products and states filtered as a saved report in Crisp, and then securely share that report internally or externally.

For example, you can share this report with a buyer to demonstrate how a promotion would perform well for these store/product combinations. You can also share this report internally with your replenishment coordinator, who will ensure you have enough inventory on hand for the promotion, or digital marketers or merchandising coordinators who may want to run digital campaigns or demos alongside the promotion.

Helpful tools for promotion planning

You can also use a trade promotion management platform to help you design and plan more effective promotions. Crisp has built an integration with Promomash, the leading trade spend platform for emerging brands, to help brands leverage their actual sales and inventory data to plan, execute, and evaluate more successful promotions directly within Promomash. To learn more, visit go.promomash.com/crisp.

To learn more about how you can plan a promotion using Crisp, check out the Crisp Knowledge Base.