Promotional Effectiveness Masterclass | Part 1: Why the Market Shift Changes Everything About How You Should Be Planning Promotions

When did you last fundamentally rethink your promotional strategy? Not the budget, not the mechanics, but the underlying logic? For most FMCG brands, the honest answer is not recently enough.

The market has changed. Have your promotions kept up?

The last few years have put serious pressure on the FMCG landscape. Supply chain disruptions, geopolitical conflicts, energy price increases, and persistent inflation have fundamentally changed how consumers shop.

Prices went up, disposable income went down, and retailers responded by closing stores and pushing private labels harder. Shoppers became far more deliberate about how they spent their money, switching not just between brands, but between channels and formats.

These are not temporary corrections; they represent a structural shift. And yet, when you look at how most companies approach promotional planning, the same strategies are still being applied as though that shift simply hadn't happened.

What is not working anymore?

Historically, FMCG brands have relied on two dominant promotional approaches: Everyday Low Price (EDLP) and deep promotional events, and both are under serious pressure right now.

EDLP made sense when costs were stable and a competitive base price drove consistent volume, but when your cost base has risen significantly, holding an everyday low price becomes a margin erosion exercise rather than a growth strategy.

Deep promotions face a different problem: designed to drive volume spikes and reward loyal shoppers, they now risk subsidizing purchases that would have happened anyway, given how many consumers have already permanently traded down.

The mechanics haven't changed. The consumer responding to them has.

Why most companies are still flying partially blind

Redesigning your promotional strategy requires knowing what actually worked, what didn't, and why and that requires data from multiple sources combined into one coherent picture.

Many companies still rely primarily on internal sell-in data or retailer scan data in isolation, sometimes supplemented by consumer panel data or market research, but with integration that remains largely manual: spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and a significant amount of informed guesswork. Decisions involving millions in trade spend are being made on incomplete evidence.

The consequences are predictable. Promotions get rolled over from year to year because there is no clean way to demonstrate they underperformed, budget flows to mechanics with historical momentum rather than proven current ROI, and when volume targets are missed, the response is typically more promotion rather than better promotion. What is remarkable is how many companies accept this situation and simply move on.

Confidence comes from data integration

The companies managing this well share one thing in common: they have built the infrastructure to combine data from multiple sources into a single analytical foundation. Not just data collection, but genuine data integration with the discipline to harmonize inputs and the tooling to generate consistent, comparable outputs.

The numbers make this clear. Companies that combine and harmonize at least two data sources on a dedicated platform report extremely high confidence in their ability to quantify and forecast promotional revenue, with 96% describing themselves as confident or very confident. Among companies working with multiple sources but relying on Excel and PowerPoint for integration, that confidence drops sharply — more than half describe themselves as only somewhat confident, and 12% are not confident at all.

That gap represents real commercial risk. Confidence in forecasting determines how aggressively you can defend a trade spend proposal, how quickly you can course-correct mid-year, and whether your organization is making real decisions or rationalizing them after the fact.

Three things you can do right now

Three practical starting points are worth considering here:

• First, audit your data sources. List every source feeding into your current promotional evaluation — internal sales, retailer data, panel, shopper research — and ask honestly whether they are being actively synthesized or living in separate workstreams.
• Second, stress-test your assumptions. Take your top three promotional mechanics from last year and ask whether you can demonstrate, with external data, that they drove incremental volume rather than simply moving the timing of purchases.
• Third, identify your integration gap. The difference between confident companies and uncertain ones is not accessing data; it is whether that data is being combined into a single decision-ready view. Where does your process break down?

In conclusion

Promotional strategy is one of the highest-leverage decisions a CMO or Finance Director makes. It consumes a significant budget and sends clear signals to both retailers and consumers about how your brand competes.

If the market has fundamentally changed but your strategy has not, you’re likely leaving revenue on the table, or actively eroding margin to defend an approach that no longer reflects the reality of your market. The companies pulling ahead are not necessarily spending more; they are making decisions with greater clarity, and that clarity starts with having the right system in place.

In Part 2 of this series, we dive into the detail of what it actually costs to run promotions without a rigorous evaluation framework and what a fact-based alternative looks like in practice.

If you want to get ahead of that now, our white paper goes deeper on how to build a promotional evaluation system that gives you real confidence in your trade spend decisions.