Promotional planning is becoming more evidence led. It is a good time to be ahead of the curve
Retailers have a deep knowledge of past performance and are modelling future scenarios with sophisticated data, and suppliers who understand their own promotional performance just as clearly are in a stronger position at the table. Quantium’s Executive Director of Consumer, Sara Hanna, shares where the opportunity sits for FMCG suppliers.
For years, promotional negotiations with major retailers followed a familiar rhythm. A supplier and a buyer would sit down, discuss discount depth and duration, and settle on a plan based largely on experience and last year’s results. It was a negotiation built on relationships and instinct. That rhythm is evolving, and it is opening a genuine opportunity for suppliers ready to move with it, across every major FMCG market.
Retailers are already modelling the scenarios
Modern promotional planning inside major retailers increasingly relies on forecasting. Category teams can test how a discount will perform under different scenarios before they raise it with a supplier. For example, a 30 per cent discount over three weeks against the same discount over four. A deeper cut for a shorter window against a shallower one stretched longer. The retailer walks into the negotiation already knowing, with reasonable confidence, what a range of options will deliver. Suppliers who bring the same standard of insight put themselves in an excellent position to help shape the conversation, rather than simply respond to it, and this holds true whether the retailer relationship in question is in Australia, the United Kingdom, or the United States.
Most suppliers enter promotional planning with strong intuition about their own brand’s performance. What is often missing is the wider context: how promotional activity is playing out across the category, where the white space opportunities sit, and what execution gaps are quietly eroding return on investment. Three gaps tend to show up repeatedly heading into planning season. The first is visibility, since suppliers often work from last quarter’s figures or annual aggregates, rather than a near real-time read on promotional performance across every brand in the category. The second is range clarity, understanding exactly where a product is underperforming, where gaps in the range remain unfilled, and what shopper behaviour is signalling about unmet need. The third is execution quality, knowing whether promotions are reaching shoppers effectively, and where the gap sits between promotional investment and shelf impact.
What the sales lift is actually made of
The most useful question is not how much a supplier is spending, but what that spend is achieving. Every promotion produces a lift in sales, and the detail that makes the real difference is what that lift is made of. Some of it is genuine incremental volume, shoppers who would not have bought the product at full price but were brought in by the promotion. Some of it is forward buying, shoppers who would have bought anyway, just stocking up early or in bulk because of the deal, so the sale is pulled forward rather than truly new. And some of it is cannibalisation, where the promotion pulls shoppers away from other products or brands in the same sub-category, rather than growing the sub-category overall. Separating these things gives a supplier a much richer picture than sales data alone. It shows not just that a promotion moved volume, but whether it genuinely grew the category, simply shifted the timing of a sale, or just took share from a neighbour on the shelf, and that is valuable information either way.
Discount depth and duration set the offer, but they rarely tell the whole story of why a promotion performed the way it did. Off-shelf display matters, since whether a product gets a prominent secondary location, not just its regular shelf position, changes visibility at the moment a shopper is deciding. Catalogue placement matters too, since a feature in the retailer’s catalogue can extend a promotion’s reach well beyond in-store shoppers alone.
Retail media plays a role as well, as paid visibility within the retailer’s own digital and in-store media can influence which promotions shoppers notice first. And online activation is increasingly decisive, since as more shopping activity moves online, digital shelf placement and search visibility increasingly determine whether an online shopper sees a promotion at all. Two identical discounts can produce very different results depending on which of these levers were pulled alongside them, and a supplier reviewing promotional performance without accounting for these factors risks drawing the wrong conclusion about what actually worked, and why.
Negotiating from evidence, not instinct
This is the distinction that strengthens a supplier’s position. A supplier who can show a retailer, with real transaction data, which promotions genuinely built base volume, and what combination of discount, display, and activation drove that result, is negotiating from a position of confidence. The conversation shifts naturally from “prove your value” to “here is how we grow together.”
Across major retailers globally, promotional planning generally runs on a recurring cycle, moving from deal negotiation through to calendar placement well ahead of each season. That gives suppliers a real window to prepare, wherever they are negotiating. Understanding true promotional performance before the negotiation begins means walking in with a clear, confident position. The suppliers who do this well are not necessarily spending more. They are spending with more precision, backing the promotions that genuinely grow the category and refining the ones with room to improve, and what used to take weeks of manual analysis increasingly takes days, closing the gap between guesswork and precision.
Retail teams around the world are moving toward a more evidence-led model of promotional planning, and that is good news for suppliers ready to meet them there. Bringing the same standard of insight is a straightforward way to have a stronger conversation and secure better outcomes, regardless of market. Even well-resourced revenue growth management teams rarely get a clear view of the split between incremental volume and cannibalisation across their own promotions, let alone how display, catalogue, and online activation contributed to it. It is a gap worth closing and closing it could make a real difference heading into the next planning cycle.
If you are curious what that split looks like for your own category, get in touch with a Quantium consultant here.