12 Things To Consider Before You Decide to Use the GrowByData’s MAP Enforcement Solution

Brand Channel Managers have many tools to choose from to detect MAP violations. With all of  these options, how should brand managers decide which one of the right fit for their company’s needs?

Follow along to learn why you may not want to use the effective, efficient, and customizable GrowByData solution.

1. You don’t care if your MAP monitoring tool offers accurate, trustworthy data.

Potential Consequences

Without accurate data, MAP violations are easily missed, which means that resellers that undercut pricing remain unnoticed, which ultimately leads to revenue loss.  Consistently low prices can devalue your brand, and make it harder to maintain premium pricing and positioning.

Ineffective enforcement results when you miss violations or incorrectly target compliant resellers. Time and resources spent on addressing inaccuracies and verifying data could be better utilized in strategic initiatives.

2. You have enough internal resources to take the results a tool offers and have countless hours to spend reaching out to violators, tracking who is complying and who isn’t.

Potential Consequences

Managing MAP enforcement internally can be resource-intensive and time-consuming, diverting resources from other critical business functions. Complex tracking of which resellers have complied with your messages can be error-prone and inefficient.

Without a centralized system, ensuring consistent communication and follow-up with all violators is difficult, potentially leading to overlooked violations and inconsistent enforcement.

3. You are not worried that Amazon will drop your top retailer’s prices below MAP on the Amazon platform, and your MAP tool will flag them as a violator.

Potential Consequences

Amazon’s pricing algorithms may lower prices without retailer intervention, leading to false MAP violation flags. Incorrectly flagging top retailers can damage important business relationships.

Resolving these false flags can be time-consuming, diverting resources from other critical tasks and potentially harming retailer trust.

4. You don’t care about your top retailer getting annoyed with you due to the insensitive violation messages you send the Monday after a major holiday.

Potential Consequences

Automated messages sent at inappropriate times, such as right after a major holiday, can irritate retailers and harm long-term business relationships.

Insensitive timing of communication can lead to retailer annoyance and reduced cooperation in maintaining MAP compliance.

5. You don’t incentivize your retailers that are following MAP. Hence, you don’t need to know the retailers that are playing by your MAP rules.

Potential Consequences

Not recognizing compliant retailers can lead to missed opportunities to reinforce positive behavior. A lack of data on compliant retailers can result in an incomplete understanding of your reseller landscape.

Failing to incentivize compliance can reduce motivation for resellers to adhere to MAP policies, potentially leading to more violations.

6. You don’t need to know retailers that aren’t in your channel program that are selling your products and violating MAP.

Potential Consequences

Unauthorized sales by untracked retailers can impact your brand’s value and MAP enforcement. Missing out on unauthorized sellers means a significant portion of violations may go unaddressed.

Unaddressed violations on unauthorized channels can harm your brand’s reputation and pricing integrity.

7. You know how best to manage your channel and your resellers. You don’t need to understand how other channel managers in your industry are tracking and enforcing MAP.

Potential Consequences

Not leveraging industry best practices can lead to missed opportunities for improving MAP enforcement. Ignoring industry trends and strategies can place you at a disadvantage compared to more proactive competitors.

Staying isolated from industry insights can hinder your ability to optimize your MAP policies and enforcement techniques.

8. You don’t care about the tone of the messages you send to your violating resellers. You are ok with sending the same stern message for all products they violate MAP on. You aren’t worried about irritating them even if they sold under MAP price by a cent warning them you will file a lawsuit against them.

Potential Consequences

Harsh, uniform messages can alienate retailers and damage long-term relationships. Insensitive messaging may lead to resistance rather than compliance, reducing the effectiveness of MAP enforcement.

Sending the same stern message for all violations can irritate retailers, especially for minor infractions, harming cooperation.

9. You don’t care to monitor MAP violations that are happening on individual e-commerce sites.

Potential Consequences

Failing to monitor individual e-commerce sites can result in numerous undetected MAP violations. Unaddressed violations on e-commerce sites can harm your brand’s reputation and pricing integrity.

Overlooking e-commerce site violations can lead to widespread non-compliance, damaging your brand’s overall market position.

10. Your channel manager doesn’t need additional custom reports to track and personalize his/her outreach to the violators.

Potential Consequences

Standard reports may not provide the detailed insights needed for personalized and effective enforcement. Lack of custom reports can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for targeted enforcement.

Inefficient tracking and outreach can reduce the effectiveness of MAP enforcement, leading to persistent violations.

11. You have a very limited budget for the tool and want the cheapest. However, you have abundant budget and resources to interpret the data and do more work to verify their accuracy.

Potential Consequences

Opting for a cheaper tool might lead to higher costs in the long run due to inaccurate data and additional verification work. Manually verifying data accuracy can be time-consuming and inefficient.

A cheaper solution may require significant resources to interpret and verify data, reducing overall cost-effectiveness.

12. You don’t need to talk to anyone when you have questions about the MAP monitoring tool’s results. You have the time to dig through the data and figure out the answers and don’t need the solution provider’s help.

Potential Consequences

Manually digging through data to find answers can be inefficient and time-consuming. Without expert support, you might miss out on valuable insights and optimization opportunities.

Lack of support can lead to delays in resolving issues, reducing the overall effectiveness of your MAP enforcement efforts.

In Conclusion

We hope this MAP Pricing Buying Guide will help you understand whether you are a fit for the GrowByData solution. You might wonder if GrowByData’s Map Enforcement product is better than MAP monitoring products of Wiser, Intelligence Node, Prisync, Trade Vitality, and others. While every solution must have its pros and cons, we hope this guide helps you understand why GrowByData’s Map Solutions is a great fit for you to keep violations to a minimum. If you are an ok paying for a robust solution that will help you manage your channel for an overall lower total cost when you factor in the tool cost and the human cost, we would love to talk to you and show you why our customized minimum advertised price monitoring software and service will give you peace of mind as you monitor and enforce MAP violations.

Leading brands use us to get customized brand monitoring solutions to clamp down on MAP, trademark, affiliate, channel territory, and other channel management problems and ultimately defend their brand. It is very easy to start with GrowByData Map Monitoring Software, get the value, and we are super flexible and design our solution and service model to delight our clients.