What is trade marketing?
Trade marketing is the marketing a brand aims at the trade, meaning distributors, wholesalers, retailers and on-trade outlets, rather than at consumers, to win listings, visibility and execution where the product is sold. It sits between brand marketing and the sales team, and its budget is spent outlet by outlet, so the opportunity is knowing where a programme can win.
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What trade marketing covers
Brand marketing makes consumers want the product; trade marketing makes sure they find it, see it and can buy it in the outlet. In the on-trade that means:
- Outlet programmes: listing deals, menu placement and serve standards
- Visibility: POS material, branded glassware, coolers and back-bar placement
- Promotions and activations: events, sampling, staff incentives
- Tools for sales: outlet targeting, the perfect store standard, selling stories for reps
How to measure it
Trade marketing is judged on what changes in the outlets it touched.
Trade spend return (%) = (incremental gross margin - trade spend) / trade spend x 100
The word that matters is incremental: the margin the programme added, not all the margin those outlets made. Measure it against a control group of similar outlets that did not get the programme. Alongside the return, teams track listing and visibility metrics: numeric distribution, menu penetration, share of menu and a perfect store score.
Worked example
Take a spirits brand in one city, with amounts in price units.
- The brand runs a menu and POS programme in 100 cocktail bars at 200 per outlet: trade spend = 20,000.
- A control group of 100 similar bars gets nothing. Over six months, programme bars earn the brand 300 more gross margin each than control bars: incremental margin = 30,000.
- Trade spend return = (30,000 - 20,000) / 20,000 = 50%.
Without the control group, the team would have credited the programme with every sale in those bars, including the ones that would have happened anyway.
Trade marketing, shopper marketing and sales
Shopper marketing targets the consumer at the moment of choice, inside the outlet. Trade marketing targets the outlet and the distributor. Sales negotiates the listing and the order. Usage varies: in some companies trade marketing and shopper marketing are one team, called customer marketing, and in smaller companies the sales lead runs trade marketing too.
How Dashmote data helps
Dashmote helps pick the outlets a programme should reach, such as those that list a competitor but not you, reading menus, photos and delivery listings, and check afterwards whether the brand made it onto the menu. Branded POS material in date-stamped public photos is read too, in selected markets. Ask us about yours. See on-premise brand tracking and POS material detection.
DashLeads tracks 20M+ venues.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between trade marketing and marketing?
Marketing usually means building demand with consumers; trade marketing builds availability and visibility with the outlets and distributors that sell to them.
What does a trade marketing manager do?
A trade marketing manager plans and runs the programmes that win listings and visibility in outlets, manages the trade budget and measures what each programme returned.
What are examples of trade marketing?
Listing deals, branded coolers and POS material, menu placement, staff incentives, sampling events and promotions agreed with outlets or wholesalers.
How do you measure trade marketing ROI?
Compare the margin in outlets that got the programme with a control group that did not, subtract the trade spend, and divide by the trade spend.
Is trade marketing part of sales or marketing?
It sits between the two and reports into either, depending on the company. Its work is done through the sales team, but its budget and standards often come from marketing.