“Number one is to get your price right – never start from a low price.”
– Ipek Erdogan-Trinkaus, Milkadamia 

6. In-Store Promotion

Promotions at the shelf can boost initial trial and drive early adoption of your product with your key retailers. There are several ways to do trade promotion in support of your new launch – the most common examples are coupons, temporary price reductions or TPRs, displays, and samples. In-store demos are an effective way to hand out samples, showcase your product, and entice shoppers to try and buy. Combined with a promo, it can be more powerful and even create loyal repeat customers. 

Whatever type of promotion you execute, it’s important to be able to track the effectiveness and ROI of these programs. The earlier brands start collecting historical insights on their in-store sales and promotional capabilities with retailers, the more confidence they can gain with buyers on future deal negotiations. It sets your brand up for long-term success and strong relationships when you can confidently promise certain results based on real data. This is where a trade promotion management platform like TradeGenius by Promomash becomes an invaluable asset to growing brands. 

Kevin McCay, Chief Operations Officer at Safe Catch, reminds us of the importance of having data behind retailer discussions. “Communicating how much effort you’re going to put into promoting at the store level and having those tools available so that you can say ‘we have data that says this works…if we do this in your store, it’s gonna be good for the both of us’,” McCay explained, makes for a more confident and mutually beneficial negotiation with retailers.

7. Watch Deductions & Chargebacks

One bad promotion deal or retailer/distributor partnership has the potential to affect your entire business. Trust your instincts but be cautious in decision-making. In CPG, there’s a painful lesson around every corner, and a frequent source of pain for many brands, as mentioned earlier, is customer deductions or chargebacks. Ironically, however, this pain is totally preventable. By closely understanding your contracts and keeping a vigilant eye on charges as they come through, you can avoid surprises and potential pitfalls that may arise – and have the backup needed to dispute incorrect charges.

“Launching into a new market is so exciting…but there are rip-offs at every turn,” said Diana Callahan, Co-Owner at Bellwether Farms. If brands are not careful, they could be committing to way more than they bargained for. “You don’t realize that you’ve signed up for a promotion for one year where you thought it was only going to be 60 days…be careful about what you’re signing up for, and honestly trust your gut…you know your product the best.”

The timing of deductions and accruing them as they are incurred is important to avoiding surprises as well, according to Matthew Wood, Director of Retail at Rishi Tea & Botanicals. “In terms of slotting and free fill, it’s extremely important to get the timing of those deductions right…if you’re launching with a retailer in a given month, the bill back may not come through for six to eight months.” He goes on to explain that by using Promomash to enter and accrue deductions, they’re able to better plan for the expenses whether they come through or not. 

As a reminder, Promomash offers a done-for-you deduction service called DeductionGenius that manages the entire process end-to-end and goes as far as fighting invalid deductions and chargebacks on your behalf. This frees you to focus on other aspects of your launch or new retailer relationship while having the peace of mind to know you’re on top of deductions. 

“Make sure you’re monitoring your velocities and promotions…get those key takeaways and understand what’s working and what’s not, because that is going to be what keeps you in the store.”
– Laurel Orley, Daily Crunch 

8. Know Your Category

In a field where there is so much innovation, emerging better-for-you CPG brands launching a new product or market owe it to themselves to gain a thorough understanding of the category they are in. This includes pricing, competitors, promotional strategies, consumer trends, and more. Be prepared with this knowledge pre-launch and build it into your plan, then monitor for changes post-launch. 

George Curran, VP of Sales at Gimme Health Foods, believes that understanding your category and planning are both top considerations for a launch. “You’ve got to really understand who your competitors are, the pricing and also their promotional strategy…and then lay a course and be consistent with your plan. Don’t deviate.” He adds that developing a feedback loop with your category managers is a key part of tracking the plan and staying atop of changes.  

Again, when it comes to understanding your category and planning, having the right data and insights at your disposal is crucial. As mentioned before, you can leverage a tool like Crisp to monitor velocities, inventory, and other critical sales metrics in near real-time, across all major retailers, to see how you’re doing in stores. And when it comes to deeper analysis on trade and non-trade spend, trade rate, promotion effectiveness, sales lift and more, the CPGenius suite of tools from Promomash can provide key metrics. 

9. Continuous Improvement