Challenge
Faced with escalating trade promotion costs and spend rates exceeding industry averages, Barber Foods was challenged to find better ways to track trade spending and improve promotional cost efficiency while maintaining sales volume.

Solution
As part of the overall initiative to create a world-class sales and marketing organization, Clarkston Consulting was engaged to develop a strategy and implementation plan for Barber Foods' Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) process based on industry best practices. The strategy and implementation plan included:

		Trade promotion maturity assessment for three channels
		Process review and improvement plan
		Technology review including gap analysis
		Quantifiable analytics creation based upon event-level metrics
		Dashboard and scorecard template design and creation

Benefits
Using fact-based trade promotion analytics, Barber Foods is able to collaborate with their retail customers to jointly restructure their trade programs. With better compliance and knowledge as to which types of merchandising activities produce the highest consumer sales for each specific retailer account, stronger trade partnerships are forming to drive topline growth and bottom line profits. These changes look to reduce promotional spending by nearly 10% while increasing consumer sales through improvement in trade performance and better retail execution (features, displays, and temporary price reductions).

Through improved processes and internal change, Barber Foods is able to better invest funds in events that produce a positive Return on Trade Investment (ROTI). This will create gains in total profit between 1-2% per year.

Download full PDF