Among the top colleges and universities you can find nearly any major or minor subject area imaginable, that is except for trade promotion management and promotion optimization. This is a critical area of study that needs to be included in any marketing, advertising, supply chain management, retail business curriculum.

I have spent the past year writing a book about trade promotion management, execution and analytics—one of the first such books, I believe, that covers the entirety of trade and channel promotion. As part of my research, I spent weeks looking at the entire universe of book publishing to identify similar books covering this subject and found very few texts available on these areas of business process and practice.

And I think that is being very liberal with the work, “available.”

There are some very good works done around the periphery, such as topics covering co-marketing, sales promotions in the context of demand planning (where you might see more mentions of trade promotion), and a few topics covering more traditional co-operative advertising subjects.

If you “google” trade promotion, or any derivative of the term, you end up with millions of listings about international trade agreements, promoting goods and service importing and exporting, thousands of variations on NAFTA, USMCA, or EU-Mercosur trade agreements.

But little or nothing about trade CHANNEL promotion.

After more than 200 years of manufacturer-offered subsidization of retailer, wholesaler or distributor advertising and marketing to the local consumers, you would think this topic would generate hundreds of thousands of hits featuring trade and textbooks covering the subject. But there isn’t.

I have often asked the question of audiences I am speaking to about their backgrounds and education around trade and channel promotion—anything fitting the trade promotion management, analysis and execution acronym we call “TPx.” I would ask, “How many of you studied TPM or any variant of it including co-op advertising or sales promotion funding in college?”

Maybe in an audience of 100, I would get a few hands. Intrigued, I would ask how. Usually, almost always, they would say it was a specific professor who had been in the industry and had a lecture or two on the subject.

But where are the textbooks?

I have spent a good number of hours lecturing college and university classes as a guest lecturer on the subject myself, and I am always amazed at the wide-eyed look on the students’ faces. At least they were among a very few people who walked across the platform with diploma in hand who had any knowledge of TPx before they entered the workforce.

How does a college award a degree in marketing, or supply chain management, or advertising, or business, or economics or accounting without a solid couple of semesters of trade promotion management? How do you overlook the second largest line item in the company financials when declaring a graduate ready for the workforce in any consumer products organization, retailer, wholesaler or distributor?

How does that happen?

I called one of the professors at the University of Texas recently asking him about his thoughts on trade promotion and why the McCombs School of Business at UT does not have trade promotion included in its curricula and why other schools fail to include it significantly in the mix. “I think trade and co-op are probably mentioned a lot in the course of study and lectures, but as a specific course, there is probably some degree of ignorance of its importance in the overall business of consumer goods,” he said. He has had the value of more than 20 years in the consumer goods industry himself, so he knows the critical importance of trade promotion to the success or failure of any product in the retail and wholesale channels of distribution. “But as a separate course, or group of courses, I think we as academia have failed our kids in a big way on this topic.”

You think?

As I wrote in my book, there are so many stories of graduates from their universities’ marketing, supply chain management, business or advertising courses of study where their first real job in a CPG company is helping manage one or more aspects of the trade promotions. The level of understanding of what TPx really is can be very low, with them having to scramble to learn and work in the TPx environment at a pace needed to have outstanding performance from the start. It is not a statement on their intellect or talent, rather their lack of knowledge about one of the most important areas of business in all of consumer goods.

One of the people I have reading the early manuscript for the book commented that he felt that there were possibly four courses that could come from the book I am about to publish. We did consider it as a potential textbook, and one of the largest textbook publishers are taking a look at it. But he felt that a good course breakdown would be:

  • TPM 101: Introduction to Trade & Channel Promotion Management – The purpose of trade promotion, the variation in channel incentive promotion types and forms, how companies fund and pay channel promotions, the origins and history of trade promotion, the legal and regulatory actions impacting the companies offering and participating in these programs, and the detailed processes, policies and procedures around the various forms of channel incentives promotions. This course emphasizes the mapping and evaluation of functions and processes to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness in promotion management, execution and analysis.
  • TPM 102: Planning and Execution of Trade & Channel Promotions – The processes and procedures involved in account planning, promotion planning, channel execution, performance measurement and settlement of trade promotions. This course covers collaborative interactions with various corporate organizations, channel retailer and distributor customers, and external technology partners to create effective promotions.
  • TPM 201: Advanced Trade & Channel Promotion Analytics – Methods and practices of measuring the key performance indicators for trade and channel promotion performance, advanced analytics including the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning data science and the application of applied intelligence to increase the visibility of promotional performance, ROI and success drivers for all forms of trade and channel incentive promotion.
  • TPM 202: Optimization of Trade & Channel Promotion – An expanded course in how promotions can be optimized through the application of advanced data science to generate predictive and prescriptive promotions, align with corporate marketing and local retailer-generated advertising and instore promotional events.

Of course, this is highly speculative; but think about the importance of a college graduate coming out with this level of knowledge and understanding. How much more productive would they be? This is compared to an excellent high school athlete graduating in December of their senior year to enter college and take part in spring practices—getting real on-the-ground experience playing with college talent and being ready for the first game of the year in the coming fall.

Or, entering college in September and sitting on the bench until he has enough time in practices to understand the system, the playbook, and get hit a few times to know how it feels.

The latter is how a recent marketing grad with a Magna cum Laude GPA might feel entering the workplace with a responsibility that entails dealing with trade promotion in any way.

Unfortunately, there are few real training programs for trade promotion outside the colleges and universities as well, with one being the current Collaborative Marketing Certification course that is offered by Promotion Optimization Institute (https://poinstitute.com/certification-ccm/). This is a learning experience that is designed to help both new and seasoned consumer goods marketing executives accelerate their personal and corporate performance levels around trade and channel marketing and promotion.

Nobody argues with the need to include trade and channel promotion in the college curriculum, and certainly there are some colleges with specialties in food and consumer marketing where you might see these types of courses. Colleges and universities would do themselves proud to add at least some mid and upper level courses on trade promotion management and execution so that their graduates will have a more grounded understanding of what it is like in the real world.

And there is nothing more real than trade channel promotion.

Rob Hand

Author Rob Hand

Consumer products industry domain expert specializing in trade promotion management and execution. Experienced data and analytics professional focused on how your company can improve the ROI, reduce failure rates and improve overall value for the money you spend on trade promotion, co-op advertising, consumer marketing, demand planning and retail execution. When your company is ready to move to a new vendor, develop a more advanced data and AI capability, improve the collaboration with your marketing department and retail accounts, I am the best contact you can make. Independent, reliable domain knowledge and a long history of success will ensure your own successful results.

More posts by Rob Hand

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.