Shoppers expect to find our categories and brands… where they expect to find them!
Our customer competes with other retailers or wholesalers for market share based on a deep understanding of shoppers and the category growth drivers. This means it’s often difficult for us to achieve the levels of distribution we would like with our customer as he/she seeks to manage overall category profit – and makes decisions on the range sold in different shop formats.
In a modern internet connected world, the channel is the shopper and shoppers shop across multiple channels. It is imperative that our category and brand are visible and available. This can be hard to achieve when we are not optimising our trade spend by investing in reach, since our resources are finite and any inefficient spend hampers our ability to be where shoppers are.
We can reduce and optimise our trade spend by spending effectively for reach (to achieve our targeted weighted and numeric distribution with customers) and generating incremental sales from increased points of purchase in our customer, for the same trade spend.
We must be able to answer the following questions:
- Do we have our fastest selling SKUs in full distribution?
- Are our products displayed in the right categories and in the right shelf/ website position?
- Do we have the right visibility based on share of shelf to avoid out of stocks on fast moving SKUs?
- Are we building weighted and numeric distribution in the right trade channels and customers?
Distribution and range is an important customer KPI. Ensuring our brand or service is in the right points of purchase is a key way to grow the category and our brands. We must know how our distribution compares to competitors and have an effective strategy to both maximise our distribution depth and increase our overall trade spend return on investment.
How effectively are you investing for distribution and reach?
Next in our ‘Top 10 Tips to Reduce Trade Spend’ series we make sure that we are driving the right return on investment for non promoted sales. If you have any questions or comments please get in touch.