How To Win the Beverage Sales War With POS Marketing Data

Who Are OnTrak’s Customers?

OnTrak’s customers are typically those organizations in beverage companies that are responsible for the ordering, creation and placement of brand specific point-of-sale marketing materials. Generally speaking this means our customers are not retailers. Rather our customers (and prospects) are one or two levels before the retailer in the supply chain. In short, our customers are the distributors and their suppliers who create and/or fund the production of POS promotional initiatives: Advertising placed in the retail environment, for example.

Winning the War

With this foundation, I can now suggest that our customer’s point-of-sale data bases, maintained by OnTrak software solutions, are chock full of data that can be compiled, sorted and presented in reports that provide brand and product sales management with information about ‘How to Win the Beverage Sales War With POS’ specifically by knowing when to place POS marketing materials so that they are most likely to produce the greatest likelihood of success - Success being defined as an increase in sales.

Before we get to the particulars of how OnTrak products can help beverage suppliers and distributors maintain or gain competitive advantage, let’s discuss how the information in OnTrak’s databases can be used to produce a better understanding of when POS is likely to have the most impact.

To begin, it is not just helpful, it is imperative that you think about how and when retail shoppers become buyers. We need to think B2C, not B2B — this means, for example, that we recognize that consumers shop, typically, much more frequently than businesses.

Most consumers shop at least weekly, some several times per week. Studies for years have shown that the amount spent per shopping trip supports the conclusion that more is spent at the beginning of the month than at other times. Next in the order of spending per trip is: Weekends. The higher spending periods (beginning of the month and weekends) are, hopefully, obvious.

Ask Yourself These Important Questions

If these consumer profiles are correct, then here are some questions to ask:

• Does your POS refresh or push correspond to these times of the month?
• Do your sales increase at the beginning of the month and on weekends?
• Can you correlate your POS push to sales and time of the month?
• Do you have a marketing plan in place that utilizes measurement and reporting tools enabling you to track and measure monthly, semi-weekly and weekly retail spending cycles?
• Do you even have the data to produce reports by week, month, quarter, etc. compared to prior periods that will give your marketing and sales teams actionable information to assist them in planning and implementing at-retail marketing campaigns that are statistically proven to provide the greatest sales increase and maximum ROI?
• Do you have the tracking, analyzing and reporting tools to allow you to filter your reports by ethnicity, store type, POS type, territory or zip code?
• And finally, is your POS promotion spending simply defensive — suggesting that you’re just doing what your competitors do, rather than going on the marketing at-retail offensive, effectively putting the shoe on the other foot?

Do You Have The Data? - And Can You Get To It?

Only you know if you have the data required to answer the preceding questions — unless you’re already an OnTrak subscriber. Our subscribers capture dozens of data elements about their POS campaigns: They know what POS went to which customers (and they know every detail about that POS including brand and product being promoted, ethnicity, informational or promotional message, sale price, etc.), when it was ordered, produced and placed, and how much it cost and the correlation of POS marketing to sales of the promoted product.

This means OnTrak customers can actually measure what POS works best to enable them to achieve their sales objectives. Our subscribers can provide manufacturers and suppliers with visual verification of at-retail POS placement if required for compliance or marketing allowances recovery.

Of course it probably is possible to track, measure and manage your at-retail marketing without our software tools — it’s just that our customers tell us we not only make it look easy — it is as easy as 1-2-3. 

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