The COVID-19 coronavirus is the “black swan” event of this decade, perhaps of our entire generation. It will undoubtedly change the CPG and retail industries in ways yet unknown. We don’t have time to sit back and reflect on it at this moment, because our CPG clients and their retail customers have to deal with the crisis on hand.
We spoke with several CPG clients this morning, and they all confirmed that they are getting calls from retailers asking to halt all near-term promotional activity in order not to exacerbate the already surging demand for food, personal care, OTC medications and home care products. Promotions are being cancelled or postponed.
In order not to waste precious marketing budgets and respond to the customer requests, CPG marketers are working overtime. On their to do list:
- Identify upcoming promotions that are at risk
- Issue urgent instructions to their team members in the field
- Update creative agencies and media vendor partners across the country
- Roll up the savings, or give-backs to report to management and finance
In time of uncertainty, Shopperations will help you to easily re-plan and remain in control of the ever changing situation. Make the tool do the work and save you time and efforts.
Below are several easy steps Shopperations users can take to identify, cancel or postpone their promotional plans and report the results to their management and peers.
Apply Filters To Quickly Identify At Risk Events
Use filters on the Events Page to select affected Customers by using the “Retailers” filter:
Use the same Events list filter to select Event Start Quarter to focus on events that are coming up in Q2:
Use Event Notes To Seamlessly Align With The Team
If you are a team lead or a budget owner who needs their field-based marketers to cancel upcoming promotions, use Event Notes feature to indicate which events should be cancelled or postponed.
Update Event Status to “Cancel” To Signal Change
If you are the Event Owner, open the event and under the three-dot menu on the top right, select “Cancel this event” option. Alternatively, if you have a strong reason to believe that the same promotion will be happening later in the year, rather than canceling the event, you may un-commit and change the event dates.
Choose “Cancel”, Not “Delete” To Avoid Re-Work
Both “delete” and “cancel” actions un-allocate the funds from the event and make them available for re-planning or give-back. However, if you choose to cancel the event, you will preserve all the planning assumptions, tactic details, attachments and all the communications around the event for future use and reporting. If the program comes back to life later in the year, you can simply “un-cancel” the event and bring it back to life. Look for “Move to previous state” option under the three-dot menu inside the event.
Run Reports To Easily Roll Up Data
If you need to quickly summarize and share data about the programs to be cancelled and the total amount of possible give-back, use the Shopperations Report Engine to get the answers. Here is an example of a report that has all relevant fields in it, even the comments to explain the reasons for cancelling.
Are you already using Shopperations? Do you need urgent help with managing this crisis? Let us know by creating a ticket here.
Are you considering a digital budget and promotion management system and want to give Shopperations a try? Fill out this form to schedule a demo with us!
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