As the number of online retailers continues to grow, brand manufacturers find themselves adopting and implementing a Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) policy. While having a MAP Policy is a step in the right direction, enforcing your MAP is them most critical step.
Brand manufacturers know that consumers associate price to brand value. When sellers decide to violate your MAP and advertise below what you’ve determined the minimum value of your product, your brand prestige declines. In fact, once your product has been advertised at a lower price, consumers will expect to see similar discounted prices in the future. That’s why monitoring and enforcing your MAP is so vital to protecting your brand; you don’t want consumers experiencing pricing inconsistencies.
Authorized sellers are least likely to violate your MAP because they have the most to gain from following the rules. It’s the unauthorized sellers that have a higher likelihood of violating your MAP. Although it’s not recommended to only focus on unauthorized sellers, because you’ll have more leverage with the authorized sellers (we’ll explain that scenario in another blog). Regardless of who violates your MAP first once it’s been violated other sellers authorized and unauthorized will follow suit, creating a cascading effect through the market. Offering competitive pricing in a crowded market is more important than following your MAP for most sellers.
The challenge now is deciding how you are going to enforce your MAP and protect your brand. Even with a dedicated team, manually poring through thousands of sellers every day is time-consuming. Scouring the internet and manually entering violators on an excel spreadsheet leaves plenty of room for human error. The best way to automate this tedious process is by using a MAP monitoring solution. Using an automated solution will at the very least, help you reveal your top offenders, discover unauthorized sellers, and, in turn, protect your brand.
After years of building your reputation, the last thing you would want is to have your brand diminished because you missed the most critical step in having a MAP policy, and that is properly and actively enforcing it.
To learn more about how you can enforce your MAP policy with an automated solution contact us by clicking here or give us a call at 949-625-6117.