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The Problem
The
Market Manager client is a large global consumer goods
organization whose management lacked accurate and timely product
and customer information for the sales and marketing side of
their business.
When
the organization launches new products into the market, they
launch a group of products in a bundle at once. Leading up to
the launch date are a number of promotional and advertising
campaigns to introduce the new products. These marketing
campaigns are quite expensive and management was discovering
that many times, consumers would be very exited about a new
product, but could not find it on store shelves after being
exposed to the advertising. The timing of the advertising did
not always correspond to distributor acceptance of the new
products. The company did not have a system to track how many
of their customers had committed to listing and more
importantly, how many have ordered a new product. The result
many times was wasted advertising dollars. Management also had
no way of tracking the success of new products in the
marketplace or comparing products with comparable products from
competitors.
The
client required a system that tracked voids and associated
dollar amounts with their customers. A void, or opportunity, is
where a product could be on a customer shelf, but is not
currently. The organization also required a way to track and
analyze product distribution levels in the marketplace.
The Solution
The
Market Manager software allows the organization to track the
status of each product with each customer. Users can run price
margin analysis across customers and generate numerous reports
that show which customers are not listing, or which customers
have priced a product above or below threshold prices. Warning
flags alert users if customers don’t list selected products or
if benchmark dates have passed. Reports can be generated in
English or French. For product distribution, the software runs
a number of different analyses in both numeric and graphical
form. The software also tracks all aspects of product launch
bundles. Included are a couple of digital dashboards and a
method of uploading product distribution consumer data. The
organization now has a clear and granular picture of their
products in the marketplace. The Market Manager is designed to
be very intuitive and gives management valuable information with
which to make decisions.
Results and Benefits
The
largest benefit that the Market Manager provides is to
management in the form of rich analyses on which they can base their
decisions upon. Management now knows the status of their
products in the marketplace so they can maximize the impact of
millions of advertising dollars that they spend on various forms
of media. They can also track the popularity of products across
many metrics such as by geographic region or by customer so that
strategic product decisions can be made. The software allows
the sales department and the marketing department to share data
where necessary.
It is
difficult to calculate an exact dollar amount of value that the
application brings to the organization, but by allowing
management to make confident multi-million dollar decisions, we
can confidently say that the benefits far outweigh the cost of
developing the software.
We have
prepared a detailed white
paper for the Market Manager application. Please
download and unzip the PDF file to review the document.
Visit our
Market Manager System demo page to see the software
application in action.
You can
also download a
full length
and full screen movie of the Market Manager software if you
are interested in viewing the entire application (note that the
file is 100 megs in size and may take a while to download).
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