POS Marketing - If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It

Marketing Management

Back, when I began graduate school in the mid-seventies, I took courses in management, marketing management and advertising.  I noticed a fair amount of overlap between these courses. Even the textbooks of the day used similar approaches: Each chapter began with a presumably well-known quote; the quote was attributed to its author, if available, and the quote was relevant to the subject being covered in the chapter. 

For example:

• “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
• “Forecasting is hard, particularly of the future.” — Anonymous
• “Success is a product of unremitting attention to purpose” — Benjamin Disraeli
• “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” — Peter Drucker

In the mid-seventies, the library served as our Google — so there was only good old fashioned library research available to help us grad students with our assignments. Some concepts are able to be abstracted so easily, like the Drucker quote. Each time I read that quote, it brings to mind much of the chapter or subject matter regarding marketing performance measurement. 

Applying Drucker To Point-of-Sale (POS) Marketing

A derivative of the Drucker quote is relevant to this blog: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” 

Now I’m going to take some liberties here and hope you won’t be offended if I attribute my interpretation of what Drucker meant about measuring and managing to our tagline of 'Track, Measure, Manage' ... your investment in the POS marketing function within your beverage alcohol distributorship.

What Drucker meant by his quote is that it is impossible to determine the overall success of your company unless you keep track of and measure virtually everything about your company that is relevant to the business' success.  

This may sound simple. You know that your revenue must exceed your expenses by a margin that meets your definition of success; and if you can achieve or even exceed your expectations, you will be “successful.”

It is a fact that as businesses mature, all kinds of systems are put in place that help management quantify certain elements of the business and compare them to management or market established metrics. Then, when the comparisons are made, tweaks to certain relevant processes can be implemented, outcomes tracked, measured and compared again until management’s goals and objectives are met. 

In short, measurement supports the management of the business of beverage distribution.

How OnTrak Software Helps

As a distributor, you already know POS marketing, advertising and promotions are very significant marketing expenses for your company. This would put POS marketing in the category of expenses that certainly could benefit from some improvement. 

All of OnTrak’s products feature a powerful order entry function of course. The benefits of our automated and paperless order entry function is measured in terms of the elimination of errors and reworks, faster time-to-market, better communications between your sales and sign shop personnel and improved customer satisfaction with your marketing support. We refer to this as the ‘Tracking’ part of our software. 

It is the tracking feature alone that more than pays for the monthly subscription fee for products like SignTrak and MenuTrak. 

It’s important to have a system that more than pays for itself. In addition we have a system that goes beyond order entry and allow you to Measure and Manage your POS Marketing.

Measuring and Managing POS Marketing

Where OnTrak products really shine, and provide their greatest benefit is in the creation, collection and retention of your valuable POS data. 

Data that when compiled and formatted by using OnTrak's integrated “Analysis and Reporting” tools to measure what has happened this month, or this trimester, and compare it to budgeted POS by rep, brand, customer or supplier. Or any way you choose to slice and dice it.

Or compare POS spending to changes in demand for the products being promoted at retail (with the displays, menus and signs created by your graphics department or sign shop).
For beverage distributors, POS marketing is so fundamental. But if you don’t measure it, how can you manage it?

So we see the tracking, measuring and management of POS Marketing as a basic requirement.

And as Peter Drucker said: “. . . so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function . . . it is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result . . . .”

What Lies Ahead?

We believe that 2017 will see a new period where beverage distributor managers and executives will need to pay increasing attention to POS marketing. Not only because they need to gain control of a growing and significant expense, but because this focus will pay dividends in achieving their overall business objective of revenue and profitability. 

In 2017, for beverage distributors, POS marketing has evolved from its early beginnings of hand-made signage with orders written on bar napkins into a complete digital system for connecting distributors and their products they sell to the markets they serve.

Finally, POS will continue on its rapid pace of becoming the foundation of marketing and sales practices for large and small distributors alike.  

If 2017 is the year your top managers and executives plan to focus on leveraging POS to the fullest extent possible, to measure spending on POS, and then compare it to established budgets and sales results, you owe it to yourself to look at OnTrak’s suite of Digital Tools for POS Marketing.

All our products were designed by leading distributors to help track, measure and manage you investment in POS Marketing — not just simply order your POS materials.

The best way to see the value of all of the OnTrak Software Solutions is to view a live, online demonstration. 

Click the following link to: Request a Demo, or call one of our product experts at 513-936-4041.