Majority Of FMCG Manufacturers Struggle To Execute Planned Promotions, Says Smollan Technologies

Heath Batt, New Business Development Manager, South Africa - Smollan Technologies

Despite the scale of this investment, 61% of FMCG manufacturers report difficulty executing planned promotions, and 75% say they struggle to manage modern trade complexity altogether.

A promotional agreement negotiated at head office level does not automatically translate into consistent execution at store level. Prices may not be updated correctly and promotional periods may run shorter, or longer, than agreed.

Also, an anticipated spike in demand that a promotion is designed to generate, can be the very thing that causes an out-of-stock situation, if stock planning has not accounted for it.

Perhaps most striking is the visibility gap: according to industry research, only around 9.5% of FMCG companies are currently able to monitor promotions in-flight and end up reallocating ineffective investments in real time.

The remaining 90% are, in effect, operating blind, committing significant budget and only understanding the outcome weeks after the promotional window has closed.

Pricing visibility: are customers actually paying what you think they are?

Price is one of the most powerful levers in a supplier's commercial toolkit and it is ironically, also one of the most inconsistently monitored. Average selling prices can vary significantly across regions, banners, and even individual stores — driven by everything from local competitive dynamics to manual pricing errors.

For suppliers without daily visibility into actual transacted prices, the gap between recommended retail price and what consumers are paying can go undetected for weeks.

This matters not just for revenue optimisation, but for brand integrity. A product that is consistently selling below its intended price point in one channel undermines pricing architecture across the entire portfolio.

And during promotional periods, the inability to distinguish accurately between promotional and non-promotional pricing makes it almost impossible to calculate a true measure of incremental uplift or return on investment.

The shift from reactive reporting to proactive selling

What distinguishes suppliers who are managing these challenges effectively from those who are not, is not necessarily budget, headcount, or even strategy. It is the speed and granularity of the information they are working with.

Forward-thinking suppliers are moving away from a model where commercial decisions are informed by aggregated monthly sales data, towards one where daily, store-level information on sales, stock, pricing, and promotional performance is available to anyone who needs to act on it — from the national sales manager to the field representative visiting a store that afternoon.

This shift enables a fundamentally different kind of commercial conversation. Instead of asking 'how did we perform last month?', teams are asking 'which stores are out of stock right now, and what is that costing us today?'

Instead of waiting for a quarterly promotional review, they are identifying compliance failures within the week and course-correcting before the damage compounds.

Critically, this is not simply about having more data. It is about having the right data, structured in a way that makes the next best action obvious, whether that is a replenishment call, a field visit, a conversation with a buyer, or an adjustment to a future promotional plan.

The distinction between data and actionable intelligence is what separates a supplier that reacts to its market from one that shapes it.

The technology and data infrastructure required to operate with daily store-level visibility is no longer reserved for the large multinationals - it is increasingly accessible and necessary for any supplier who aims to defend and grow its position in modern trade.

The retail sector’s challenge

Modern trade has never been more competitive, more complex, or more demanding of suppliers. Consumers have greater choices and retailers have more data. The margin for error, whether in stock availability, promotional execution, or pricing, is narrower than it has ever been.

The research tells us that out-of-stock rates have remained at roughly 8% for five decades - that is not a supply chain failure, but a visibility and response failure.

The supply chain, in most cases, can meet demand. What is missing is the daily intelligence that tells the right people, at the right moment, exactly where to focus their efforts.

Suppliers who continue to manage their retail performance using lagged, aggregated, or incomplete data are not just leaving money on the table, they are losing ground to competitors who are not.

The question is no longer whether the industry needs to operate with greater data visibility and speed, it is how quickly individual suppliers can make that shift, and how much revenue they are willing to lose in the meantime.