Price Monitoring Solution Zeroes in on Rogue Retailers, Inspires Consumer Loyalty
Most major brands are finally starting to seek out cutting-edge data analytics applications to protect their bottom line. It’s important to note that monitoring pricing to prevent retailers from going rogue – through products such as Map Guard from PriceSpider – does as much for brand consistency and consumer relations as it does for hard margins.
What is MAP and why is it necessary?
Creating a minimum-advertised-price (MAP) policy with retailers is a way to help ensure that no matter where or when your products are sold, the advertised price cannot be lower than the prices set forth in the policy. In the past, manufacturers could easily check in with retailers, manually and on an individual level, to ensure guidelines were adhered to. These days that process is much more challenging.
The Internet has given birth to so many avenues of purchase that it would be extremely time-intensive to continue monitoring in analog. Every day, it seems more online super-venues such as Google Marketplace and Walmart Marketplace are popping up –creating more retail touch points to stay connected to and supervise. Bottom line? The more the marketplaces boil up in the industry, the more brands need to keep track of what’s going on.
Moreover, without a way to enforce your price policy, manufacturers are risking more than just revenue loss; brand identity and customer loyalty also hang in the balance.
“When properly drafted, implemented, and enforced, a MAP policy can incentivize a retailer to increase knowledge of the manufacturer’s products and improve its customer service, ensuring that resellers compete on customer service and not on price alone. This provides a strong and consistent message of the value of the product and the brand.” – Holland & Knight, LLP.
Beyond price control
With MAP Guard from PriceSpider, brands are aiming a high-tech “radar detector” at retailers to ensure no one dips below the agreed-upon price tag. This plays an essential role in helping manufacturers maintain a complete brand identity throughout every aspect of marketing—from perceived customer value to brand positioning.
There are serious repercussions to not having strict rules in place. When pricing is unknowingly altered, manufacturers often pay the price in confused and frustrated shoppers and therefore lost sales.
MAP Guard eliminates worry over which retailers have gone AWOL via the use of a single dashboard. Like the proverbial canary in a coal mine, manufacturers can use the program to immediately pinpoint problem areas and use it to identify retailers who have diverged from a signed agreement before it becomes a larger issue.
With MAP Guard from PriceSpider, users can:
- Discover which retailers are selling below pricing policy
- Learn if marketplace retailers are causing others to violate policy
- Receive notifications the moment someone violates policy
- Attach provided screenshots of violations to the email
- Directly email the violator through MAP Guard
Right now, all across the world, retailers looking to boost their bottom lines are taking matters into their own hands. To stay competitive and consistent, manufacturers should look to monitoring solutions so that they can maintain both consistent pricing and messaging. With MAP Guard from PriceSpider, manufacturers can finally patrol the e-commerce highway 24/7.
.jpg)
