Point-of-Sale Business Intelligence

A Starting Point for Marketing at-Retail Improvement

If you are a supplier, distributor or retailer, you know that point-of-sale (POS) marketing initiatives can be used to build brands, develop customer knowledge, and drive sales.

Using Business Intelligence tools, alcohol beverage wholesalers are learning how they can improve Marketing at-Retail intelligence and remove wasteful POS spending.  In 2008, at the NBWA’s annual conference, it was clear that Business Intelligence was the top technology that wholesalers were beginning to investigate and evaluate.  Now in 2010, it has almost become obvious that business intelligence, when applied to Marketing at-Retail efforts, has become one of leading and most effective tools for alcohol beverage wholesalers. Armed with this useful information they are able to reduce wasteful POS spending and to improve the impact of POS materials in retaining and growing market share.

As a wholesale distributor, you know that your retailer’s main goal for market intelligence — as it applies to POS materials — is customer demand.  Retailers want the ability to rapidly respond to and influence customer demand for the brands they carry.  As a wholesale distributor, it is likely you share these same goals.

After responding to and influencing customer demand, retailers want all the business information that they can get their hand on about their POS promotions.  Armed with that intelligence, they can make business decisions to improve customer retention and loyalty, and to increase customer sales.

Based on these goals, there is pressure on the distributors to improve their own at-Retail marketing intelligence to react to and better predict retailer demand.  For distributors, pleasing their retail customers builds stronger relationships, and can turn small purchasers into volume customers.  In today's highly competitive environment, the retailer often has many options, so maintaining and exceeding your retail customer’s expectations is critical for the distributor’s continued success.

Best Practices

Our POS Best Practices Presentation for alcohol beverage distributors is currently available, by request, from this website.  This 15-minute self-running, narrated slide presentation is a great introduction to managed, controlled and measured Marketing at-Retail concepts and practices.  Our presentation is the result of over 6 years of working with wholesale alcohol beverage distributors. 

It’s a compilation of the best practices for creating Marketing at-Retail value through information technologies, from some of the largest and leading alcohol beverage distributors.