Promotional Sins

I hold the belief that you should never run a promotion for the sake of running a promotion, because you think it's a good idea, that it will miraculously improve the business or because your competitor is doing it!

Consumers are becoming more and more discerning and getting turned-off quicker to brands, products and services where promotions are flaky, don't add real value or are dysfunctional with the brand or products values and messages.

Don't get me wrong promotions are an important part of your marketing plan and in certain cases, depending on your strategy, an essential ingredient to improvement of your bottom line. However promotions must be part of a clearly defined strategic plan and must be meaningful in your consumers eyes.

First things first, apply the S.M.A.R.T. principles, with one other ingredient: a B for budget, to your promotional planning process. The S.M.A.R.T. principle is as follows:

S - specific: Answer the question why you are running the promotion. Is it to grow sales (increased basket size or GP%?) or reward customer loyalty for repeat purchase, or a drive to enlarge a mailing list? You need to clearly state why you are running the promotion and it's objective/goal.

M - measurable: How are you going to measure the effectiveness of the promotion against your predetermined goals? For example if your goal was to increase sales by 10% then it's easily measured after the promotion has ended.

A - attainable: Do all stakeholders (staff, suppliers, customer sample) buy into the promotion (understand it and their role?) Is the implementation path simple and the business accommodating to ensure that the promotion is a success? Too many steps or procedures ruin the enthusiasm for promotions and staff may quickly lose interest and not advertise the promotion to customers.

R - realistic: Do you have enough resources (People, budget, etc), knowledge and time to run the promotion? It's no good that you have the resources and the time but your people don't know how to run the promotion because of it's complexity, i.e. setting up the POS system to process the discount or where internal controls/procedures have to be circumvented or changed..

T - time-bound: Have you set clear start and end dates. Too little time has the result that just as customers get to know of the promotion it ends or the converse where the promotion is too long that customers lose interest.

B - budget: A key principle when considering and planning your promotions is that there is no such thing as a free (or no cost) promotion. Even if you have managed to twist your supplier arms for funds to pay for printed material and competition prizes, you would still incur costs distributing the printed material and prizes. If you are giving a discount then this is a cost (lost opportunity cost) and represents a value to the business.Although these costs may be small in comparison to the overall cost of the promotion they still need to be accounted for in a business budget.

Something else to bear in mind with promotions is that you may protect your margin where you sell an item for the usual selling price but add something to it for free to make the offer appealing (Value add.) Or you may decide that you want to increase your average shoppers basket so you might bundle items together for a special price which is lower than the normal single unit price times two. Another type of promotion to consider is that customers qualify for a large prize and/or many small prizes if certain items are purchased. There are many more types of promotions which can be matched to your promotional plans and objectives.

I would suggest the only promotion to avoid are those that involve straight discounting. It might result in a price war, with a competitor, which will not benefit either business in the short term as margin and profitability fall.

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As a leader you should always start with where people are, before you try to take them to where you want them to go.

Annon

 

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If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs ... it's just possible you haven't fully appreciated the situation.
Annon

Mark-up vs Gross Profit (GP)

Mark-up is the percentage that we add onto the cost price of a product or service to determine the selling price or mark-up is the difference between the selling price and the cost price of a product or service. The gross profit is the actual profit that we make on the transaction. 

Many mistakenly believe that if a product or service is marked up by 50%, the result will be a 50% gross margin. However, a 50% mark-up produces a gross margin percentage of only 33.3.%.

For example: A product costs 100 and we add a 50% mark-up then the selling price is 150. However the gross profit is only 33%. Why? Lets look at the following calculations using the same cost and selling prices:

Mark-up:          100 x 50% = 150

Gross profit:      50 / 150 = 33.3%

We bank the GP as profit. so we are banking 50 of the selling price which is 33.3.% of the selling price. When looking at your business margins you should be working on your GP percentage and not your mark-up.

Different industries, products and services attract different GP's. This is true within a single store. Convenience stores have a GP on milk and bread of 10% but on cool drinks this rises to +30% and on their emergency grocery products to over 50%. Their average GP comes out at between 25% and 32%.

To determine your average mark-up:    GP / cost of sales x 100

To determine your GP:                         (Selling price - Cost price) / selling price x 100

To determine your ave GP:                   Gross profit / total sales

To calculate selling price where you have determined your GP%, for example if you want a 25% GP margin then use this formula:

                                   Sales Price = cost price / ( 1- GP margin percentage)

Why would we be concerned about GP margin. Well the GP margin is the percentage of every Rand that is earned which can be applied towards the costs of running the business. If your operating cost is running at 40% of sales and your GP margin is only 23% (even though your mark-up appears healthy at 30%) then you are heading for bankruptcy. Below is an extract from an article from Warren Buffet giving a simple explanation.

Note: 

1. Exclude VAT or Sales Tax from both your cost and selling prices. Add Vat or Sales Tax onto the selling price after you are happy that you have the right GP margin and that the market will pay the final selling price.

2. You can work the selling price backwards by determining what your GP% will be however this is more complicated. Tables are available to simply these calculations (available at: http://www.mrhvac.com/download/free/MarginMarkup.htm.)

"A Message from Warren E. Buffett
Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

What You Should Know About the Jewelry Business
You don't need to understand the economics of a generating plant in order to intelligently buy electricity. If your neighbor is an expert on that subject and you are a neophyte, your electric rates will be identical.

But jewelry purchases are different. What you pay for an item vs. what your neighbor pays for a comparable item can be, and often is, widely different. Understanding the economics of the business will tell you why.

To begin with, all jewelers turn their inventory very slowly, and that ties up a lot of capital. A once-a-year turn is par for the course. The reason is simple: People buy jewelry infrequently, and when they do, they are making both a major and very individual purchase. Therefore, they want to view a wide selection of pieces before zeroing in on a single item. 

Given that their turnover is low, a jeweler must obtain a relatively wide profit margin on sales in order to achieve even a mediocre return on their investment. In this respect, the jewelry business is just the opposite of the grocery business, in which rapid turnover of inventory allows good returns on investment though profit margins are low.

In order to establish a selling price for their merchandise, a jeweler must add to the price they pay for that merchandise, both their operating costs and desired profit margin. Operating costs seldom run less than 40% of sales and often exceed that level. This fact requires most jewelers to price their merchandise at double its cost to them or even more. The math is simple: Jewelers charge $1 for merchandise that has cost them 50 cents. Then, from their gross profit of 50 cents they typically pay 40 cents for operating costs, which leaves 10 cents of pre-tax earnings for every $1 of sales. Taking into account the massive investment in inventory, the 10-cent profit is adequate but far from exciting.

At Borsheim's the equation is far different from what I have just described. Because of our single location and the huge volume we generate, our operating expense ratio is usually around 20% of sales. As a percentage of sales, our rent costs alone are fully five points below those of our typical competitor. Therefore, we can, and do, price our goods far below the prices charged by other jewelers. In fact, if they priced to match us, they would operate at very substantial losses. Moreover, in a virtuous circle, our low prices generate ever increasing sales, further driving down our expense ratio, which allows us to reduce prices still more ..."

For the full article go to: http://shop.borsheims.com/Borsheims/CustomerServices-Buffett.aspx

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Control your own destiny or someone else will.
Jack Welch

Quick Tip: Keep your hands out of the till

I've seen too many cases where business owners take money out of their tills for personal expenditure. They forget to add this to their total drawings from the business and wonder why the business is not a profitable as it should be. Another negative consequence of this is that employees witnessing this may think that it is acceptable that they can also help themselves to cash from the till. The mentality begins with "if the boss can do it why can't I?" There may be occasion where employees are wrongfully accused of cash shortages when the boss has forgotten to record the cash removed from the till. Rather pay for any good or services that you consume from your wallet or assign the purchase to your personal account.

Big Business Appearance on a Small Budget

Here are a few ideas to make your small business appear to be a big business with a small budget. These ideas could also be used to cut then cost of a traditional brick and mortar set-up.

1. Virtual office: Rent office space on a permanent or temporary basis from a virtual office provider. You get a prestigious office address on your business card, dedicated mailbox, personalised call answer service using your business name, your own dedicated number and office space for meetings.

2. Virtual Assistant: Rent a virtual assistant to provide professional administrative assistance to clients from a remote office. Calls are screened and then forwarded to the relevant person in your business. These services provide a personalised call answer service using your business name and your own dedicated number.

3. Virtual helpdesk: There are a variety of virtual helpdesk services available for hire from IT, to employee support programs to customer service, etc. IT helpdesk's are the most common where your business has technicians on call instead of hiring a permanent employee.

4. Virtual call centre: These services can be employed to answer calls and route to appropriate geographically dispersed staff using your personal business number or become more advanced where they provide dedicated customer support and service, at a fraction of the cost of setting up your own call centre and dealing with high staff turn-over.

5. Virtual software: This utilises software and 3rd party servers, instead of yoru own, to create a virtual office and intranet environment. Types of services offered are e-mail, calendar syncing, document storage and management, intranet work spaces, forums, web conferencing, etc.