MAP ComplianceQuad Analytix Industry Insights

OverviewManufacturers often implement pricing guideline policies to control downstream prices and brand integrity while preventing products from being used as loss-leaders in their respective categories. These programs are designed to support premium positioning of brand images while maintaining sufficient margins to facilitate tecnology developments and new product introductions. So called MAP (minimum advertised price) Pricing can ensure high levels of customer service and quality as retailers are forced to compete on the grounds of delivering superior service as opposed to offering the lowest price. These pricing policies are important tools for manufacturers as they try and coordinate their distribution channels and prevent destructive pricing behavior. The rapid rise of E-commerce in recent years poses a significant threat to manufacturers given the shortcomings of monitoring MAP violations in the digital age. With thousands of retailers across multiple distribution channels, manufacturers are forced to police these resellers across disparate sources including online shopping engines, product listing ads, and merchant sites with an ever growing number of dynamically changing SKUs.

Identifying Key ThreatsA 2011 study conducted at the Kellogg School of Management found that two major factors contribute to incidents of MAP violations: Lack of product assortment & unauthorized resellers. Namely, authorized resellers that offer a broad assortment of a manufacturer’s products are significantly less likely to violate MAP agreements than those with a limited assortment. Intuitively, a broader assortment indicates a significant investment on the part of the retailer signalling greater willingness to abide by such agreements. Unauthorized resellers have less commitment and loyalty to a specific brand with limited motivation to abide by a minimum price restraint. As a result, manufacturers should focus on developing relationships with key authorized resellers to broaden their assortment capabilities while preventing unauthorized resellers from jeopardizing their retail footprint.

Shortcomings of Current MAP Monitoring TechniquesOftentimes, manufacturers can be forced to monitor up to thousands of products for MAP violations. Manufacturers often employ techniques such as manual price grabbing with excel spreadsheets, Google Alerts, or verification from resellers, all of which fall far short of a viable solution. These manual processes ignore the dynamic nature of real-time pricing updates in today’s retail environment and make organizations susceptible to costly reporting errors. Manual price monitoring is a futile attempt to combat state of the art pricing engines.

Importance Of Robust Monitoring CapabilitiesLeveraging best of breed technology plays a critical role in monitoring MAP violations. As mentioned above, most manufacturers lack the internal resources to effectively monitor violators of MAP agreements. In order to truly enforce MAP compliance, companies need to be able to monitor and track prices across mutiple channels and distribution outlets, including: auction sites, shopping engines, digital ads, marketplaces, and merchant sites. This can only be accomplished through sophisticated software deployment capable of digesting and analyzing this data on a massive scale.

Quad can monitor and track prices with unprecedented speed and scale empowering manufacturers with pricing surveillance that can protect their brands.

Quad Solution: MAP Compliance On Demand

AUTOMATION VISIBILITY SCALE

• Automated email alerts to stay abreast of violations

• Automated detection of unauthorized resellers across the web

• Automated reporting delivered on demand to transform your compliance tracking

• Exhaustive coverage across the spectrum of shopping engines, digital ads, marketplaces, and merchant sites to spot all potential violations

• Visibility into authorized reseller compliance

• Ability to validate through image capture

• Best of breed analytics to track occurrence of violations over time

• Unlimited product matching & category expansion across thousands of products

• Searchable database of historical pricing discrepancies by select merchants and SKUs

RAPID DEPLOYMENT

SWIFT TIME TO VALUE

Quad’s MAP Compliance solutions include embedded industry workflows and functionality to ensure companies are up and running in days vs. weeks or months. There is no limit to the number of products or categories that we can track which ensures exhaustive coverage across a manufacturer’s product line.

Quad’s embedded manufacturing industry processes obviate the need to maintain costly custom software implementations and given its deployment through the cloud, there is no infrastructure to buy or maintain.

EASE OF USEOur cloud delivery model ensures that any manufacturing organization can leverage Quad’s MAP Compliance insights regardless of their underlying technology infrastructure.

ABOUT QUAD ANALYTIX

Quad Analytix is a cutting edge analytics platform designed to deliver transformative insights to the retail industry across the spectrum of pricing, assortment, and promotions. The Quad platform aggregates and normalizes millions of data points from the web freeing companies from restrictive manual processing efforts. This data is then enriched with a powerful analytics layer delivering unprecedented insights on the fly.

Learn more at www.quadanalytix.com and follow us at @QuadAnalytix

Key Benefits