Monitoring and Planning Promotional Activities

Promotional activities —flyers, in-store promotions, and online campaigns—are so complex, varied, and numerous that they’re impossible to manage at a glance. Without a comprehensive and continuous view of the promotional landscape, every trade marketing decision risks being based on impressions rather than evidence. QBerg gives you that view.

Whether you’rea brand owner ora retailer, monitoring and planning promotions means managing one of the most costly and strategic levers in the consumer goodsindustry. A poorly calibrated promotion erodes margins without shifting market share; a well-designed one protects sales volume and defends competitive position. Data makes all the difference.

Why You Can’t Manage Promotions by Eye Alone

The Italian promotional landscape changes every week, across dozens of retailers, thousands of products, and multiple channels simultaneously. Trying to track it manually leads to three recurring problems:

• partial view — you can see your own flyer, but not the entire competitive landscape in which it is situated;
• delay — by the time you realize a competitor has made a move, the promotional window has often already closed;
• Lack of historical data — without a continuous database, it is impossible to distinguish a tactical promotion from a structural repositioning.

We need tools that can provide a comprehensive and up-to-date view of who is promoting what, where, when, and how—both offline and online.

What You Can Do with QBerg’s Promotional Tracking

The platform covers the entire promotional cycle, from post-campaign analysis to planning. Specifically, it allows you to:

Verify compliance with agreements with retailers

Check afterward to see if the agreed-upon promotions were actually carried out: product listings, placement in the flyer, promotional strategy used, and promotional price. This is the way to turn commercial agreements into verifiable evidence and to give the sales force concrete points to use in their interactions with retailers.

Keep an eye on the competition

Monitor your competitors’ promotional activities product by product: how often they run promotions, what strategies they use, and how their prices fluctuate in flyers and online. This is the foundation for staying one step ahead and responding in a timely manner. This monitoring naturally complements broader competition tracking regarding prices and product assortments.

Create and Plan Your Promotions

Build your promotional plan based on data: performance history, competitor schedules, and seasonal trends in your category. Planning with an understanding of what others have done—and what they’re about to do—reduces unnecessary overlap and focuses your investment where it really pays off.

Offline and Online: A Unified View of the Promotional Landscape

Promotions run across multiple channels and often spill over from one to another. That’s why QBerg integrates the physical and digital worlds:

• monitoring of flyers (QPoint Flyer) for print and in-store promotions;
• monitoring of promotions and web campaigns (QPoint Web PROMO) for digital promotional initiatives;
• monitoring retail locations (QPoint Store) to track what’s happening on the shelves.

In strategic terms: for a Trade Marketing Manager, the question isn’t “how much have I promoted?” but “is my promotional intensity consistent with that of the category and competitors?” Only by analyzing the flyer, the store, and the website together can you tell whether you’re leading the market or following it.

Who needs it?

• Trade Marketing Manager — to plan and evaluate the effectiveness of promotional activities relative to the competition.
• Category Manager — to understand how promotions affect sales volume, margin, and turnover in the category.
• Industrial Sales Department — to monitor the implementation of agreements with retailers and support negotiations.
• Large-scale retail chains — to position their promotional activities within the competitive landscape.

How to Plan a Data-Driven Promotion: The 4 Key Factors

A solid promotional plan does not stem from intuition, but from four factors that QBerg data finally makes available and easy to interpret together:

1. History of promotional campaigns —what has been promoted in the past, how those campaigns were structured, and how they were featured in flyers and on store shelves. This history serves as a reference point for making future decisions, rather than starting from scratch every time.
2. Competitors’ promotional schedules and intensity — when and on which products other retailers and brands are focusing their efforts, to avoid unnecessary overlap and secure the right time windows.
3. Seasonality of the category — the natural patterns of demand, to anticipate peaks rather than scrambling to catch up once a promotion has already begun.
4. Category promotional pressure — how “hot” the category is as a whole, so as to calibrate investment without eroding margins in a race to the bottom that doesn’t shift market share.

Taken together, these four inputs transform the promotional plan from a mere form-filling exercise into an informed decision. And since promotions now also take place through direct digital communication, monitoring newsletters (QPoint News) completes the picture: it captures promotions sent via email by competitors—a channel that is often invisible but increasingly significant in the overall promotional landscape.

Q&A

Q: Do you monitor only flyers, or do you also monitor in-store and online promotions?

A.: We cover the entire spectrum: flyers, in-store promotions, and online campaigns, providing a single, comparable view of promotional activity.

Q: Can I verify whether my promotional agreements with retailers have been honored?

A.: Yes. It’s one of the main uses: comparing what was agreed upon with what actually appeared in the flyer or on the shelf—product codes, location, packaging, and price.

Q: Does the service also help with planning future promotions?

A.: Yes. Competitors’ performance history and promotional calendar serve as the foundation for developing an informed promotional plan and minimizing overlaps.

Govern your promotions with data, not gut feeling
Tell us about your category: we’ll show you how QBerg monitors and puts your promotional activity, both offline and online, into perspective.