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With the rapid movement of the retail landscape from season to season, it’s important to stay one step ahead of the curve when planning your promotional activities. The Promotional Planning team determines what story to tell. This team is accountable for determining the theme for each week according to seasonality or events occurring within the time frame (i.e. thanksgiving, back to school, Christmas, Hockey season etc.). Promotional planning assists retailers in optimizing the utilization of marketing tools, strategies, and resources to promote their products most effectively.
Many retailers rely on promotional activities such as flyers and emails to drive traffic to their website and brick-and-mortar stores. However, promotions cannot deliver an acceptable ROI unless they are planned strategically and well in advance, are targeted to their customers’ needs and managed effectively
When planning retail promotions, we work to find the best communication channels and tactics to reach your customers most effectively. We will work with your team across merchandising, marketing, finance, supply chain, and promotions to re-engineer the promotional planning process to ensure that the various stakeholders in the process have the right information at the right time, the first time, to ensure your customers have the right items at the right price.
We work to enhance promotional effectiveness within the company by implementing standard marketing processes; establishing the marketing strategy and calendar; allocating required resources and executing the promotion plan. We collect insights to understand if the promotion is ready for the customer and follow up to confirm that the plan is executed at the store level. Additionally, we optimize the distribution and product flow by confirming inventory readiness to the stores during a promotion. Most importantly, we conduct a post-project analysis to identify areas of improvement and additional customer insights for continuous improvement.
A lack of advanced strategic promotional planning will result in last minute changes and a less powerful flyer in terms of look and feel, flow of messaging and promotional items. Planning ahead will allow for merchants, supply chain and marketing to gain alignment. Many successful retailers build out and align their promotional plan for the entire year, locking in items in the promotional flyer as soon as 8 weeks out. This ensures all necessary parties have the required information at the right time and mitigates scrambling at the last minute to make deadlines.
Lack of alignment and adherence to the promotional process across all departments creates a lack of accountability to consequences when deliverables are late or incomplete. Last minute changes also create a sizeable amount of rework across Merchandising, Marketing and Replenishment. Getting senior management involved early in the process will create buy-in and eliminate confusion and late changes as the process escalates, which will prevent rework and waiting for lengthy approval processes when deadlines are tight. Planning retail promotions requires all parties to be on the same page and able to effectively carry out their tasks. We know this is a critical aspect of the business and always work exhaustively to ensure every promotion is executed seamlessly.