Dog eat dog in pet food

Dog eat dog in pet food
Who was our client?
A big pet care brand.

Why did they get in touch?
Supermarkets dominate over 50% of the
pet care market, and the big four are
intensely competitive. With two major
companies against each other, offers and
promotions play a huge part in the battle
to be top-dog of the aisles.

Our client was spending more and more
money on promotions without a clear
picture of which offers were working,
and which weren’t.

With the data locked away in SAP ERP,
teams weren’t able to find the information
they needed to make important decisions.

They needed us to help them:
find unprofitable spend across all SKUs
pinpoint opportunities where they could
grow – across each supermarket each
brand and each promotion mechanic
make sure the current promotions were
in line with our client’s brand strategy.
We combined our consultancy skills and
our promotions app, Acumen Invest™ to
help our client make more profitable
decisions on their promotions.

The Acumen answer
Seeing clearly
First, we freed up the data so that we
could review the trade spend by channel,
category and customer.

We then modelled different scenarios to
see which promotions were bringing in
positive returns, and which weren’t.

Looking at the growth rates by brand and
customer, we could see if these matched
the brand’s objectives

Thinking differently
We saw that there were promotions
on specific brands and pack sizes
that weren’t profitable and could be
discontinued without having a negative
effect on the overall profits.

It became clear that a big proportion
of the trade spend budget could be spent
on profitable shelf promos instead of
unprofitable display promos.

We changed the frequency of promotions
to make sure it was exactly right. We did
this by helping them to see the effect on
total P&L of having more or less weeks
on a deal – by brand and by customer.

Working smarter
We looked at the processes around trade
spend and made recommendations to
make them more efficient.

We made sure that sales teams would
need to comply with strict guidelines for
some brands in order for promotions
running on them to be profitable.