Trade promotion optimization largely depends on an exhaustive understanding and analysis of event ROI. Post-Event Analysis/ Post-Promotion Analysis determines the effectiveness of trade promotion spending. This analysis is crucial to understanding the profit and incremental volume that has been achieved for the trade dollars spent.
Post Event Analysis (PEA) is an important step in determining if an event has achieved the expected goals and success. This analysis helps sales executives drive better strategizing and decision-making, while also enabling marketers to leverage well-informed promotional opportunities.
Therefore, given how critical PEA is, it is rather surprising that too many CPG companies don’t have a structured procedure for PEA or simply skip this step.
They seem to have their attention placed solely on increases in volume, which unfortunately does not provide deeper insights into a promotion effectiveness.
Read More: A Quick Guide to Measuring Trade Promotion Effectiveness & ROI
Granted, a large section of CPG companies do want to invest in PEA, but are intimidated by the fact that it is a rather complicated capability to implement.
This is due to a glaring lack of powerful analytical function or companies attempting to implement a manual approach, which involves building a spreadsheet for each event or promotion across the organization, thereby reducing their analysis to only a limited number of promotions and only a small percentage of overall trade spending.
As limiting as it can be to do it manually, what is also concerning is how chaotic and time-consuming such a process would be. This has forced companies to choose between devoting additional resources to addressing this issue or resort to limiting the analysis to only a small portion of the promotions.
But here is why a strategic PEA capability is vital:
- It enables organizations to analyze promotions more effectively
- As a part of this analysis, they can also determine exactly which factors contributed to the effectiveness of the promotion, or the lack of it
- When promotions are evaluated efficiently, companies stand to gain at least a 10 per cent increase on their trade spending ROI
Obviously, there are clear benefits to effective PEA – gains which directly affect the bottom-line of the company. It is no surprise that CPG companies across the globe are looking very closely into their trade promotion investments, making PEA an absolutely vital capability.
Hemanth Kumar