Manufacturers struggle with MAP Pricing agreements across the retail spectrum. This article details some best practices on how to ensure MAP compliance in the digital world.

1. MAP ComplianceQuad Analytix Industry Insights
Overview
Manufacturers often implement pricing guideline policies to control downstream prices and brand
integrity while preventing products from being used as loss-leaders in their respective categories.
These programs are designed to support premium positioning of brand images while maintaining
sufficient margins to facilitate tecnology developments and new product introductions. So called
MAP (minimum advertised price) Pricing can ensure high levels of customer service and quality as
retailers are forced to compete on the grounds of delivering superior service as opposed to offering
the lowest price. These pricing policies are important tools for manufacturers as they try and
coordinate their distribution channels and prevent destructive pricing behavior. The rapid rise of
E-commerce in recent years poses a significant threat to manufacturers given the shortcomings of
monitoring MAP violations in the digital age. With thousands of retailers across multiple distribution
channels, manufacturers are forced to police these resellers across disparate sources including
online shopping engines, product listing ads, and merchant sites with an ever growing number of
dynamically changing SKUs.
Identifying Key Threats
A 2011 study conducted at the Kellogg School of Management found that two major factors contribute
to incidents of MAP violations: Lack of product assortment & unauthorized resellers. Namely,
authorized resellers that offer a broad assortment of a manufacturer’s products are significantly
less likely to violate MAP agreements than those with a limited assortment. Intuitively, a broader
assortment indicates a significant investment on the part of the retailer signalling greater willingness
to abide by such agreements. Unauthorized resellers have less commitment and loyalty to a specific
brand with limited motivation to abide by a minimum price restraint. As a result, manufacturers
should focus on developing relationships with key authorized resellers to broaden their assortment
capabilities while preventing unauthorized resellers from jeopardizing their retail footprint.
Shortcomings of Current MAP Monitoring Techniques
Oftentimes, manufacturers can be forced to monitor up to thousands of products for MAP violations.
Manufacturers often employ techniques such as manual price grabbing with excel spreadsheets,
Google Alerts, or verification from resellers, all of which fall far short of a viable solution. These
manual processes ignore the dynamic nature of real-time pricing updates in today’s retail
environment and make organizations susceptible to costly reporting errors. Manual price monitoring
is a futile attempt to combat state of the art pricing engines.
Importance Of Robust Monitoring Capabilities
Leveraging best of breed technology plays a critical role in monitoring MAP violations. As mentioned
above, most manufacturers lack the internal resources to effectively monitor violators of MAP
agreements. In order to truly enforce MAP compliance, companies need to be able to monitor and
track prices across mutiple channels and distribution outlets, including: auction sites, shopping
engines, digital ads, marketplaces, and merchant sites. This can only be accomplished through
sophisticated software deployment capable of digesting and analyzing this data on a massive scale.
Quad can monitor and track prices with unprecedented speed and scale empowering
manufacturers with pricing surveillance that can protect their brands.
Quad Solution: MAP Compliance On Demand

2. AUTOMATION VISIBILITY SCALE
• Automated email alerts to
stay abreast of violations
• Automated detection of
unauthorized resellers across
the web
• Automated reporting
delivered on demand to
transform your compliance
tracking
• Exhaustive coverage
across the spectrum of
shopping engines, digital ads,
marketplaces, and
merchant sites to spot all
potential violations
• Visibility into authorized
reseller compliance
• Ability to validate through
image capture
• Best of breed analytics to
track occurrence of violations
over time
• Unlimited product matching
& category expansion across
thousands of products
• Searchable database
of historical pricing
discrepancies by select
merchants and SKUs
RAPID DEPLOYMENT
SWIFT TIME TO VALUE
Quad’s MAP Compliance solutions include embedded
industry workflows and functionality to ensure
companies are up and running in days vs. weeks or
months. There is no limit to the number of products
or categories that we can track which ensures
exhaustive coverage across a manufacturer’s product
line.
Quad’s embedded manufacturing industry processes
obviate the need to maintain costly custom software
implementations and given its deployment through
the cloud, there is no infrastructure to buy or
maintain.
EASE OF USE
Our cloud delivery model ensures that any
manufacturing organization can leverage Quad’s MAP
Compliance insights regardless of their underlying
technology infrastructure.
ABOUT QUAD ANALYTIX
Quad Analytix is a cutting edge analytics platform designed to deliver transformative insights to the retail industry across
the spectrum of pricing, assortment, and promotions. The Quad platform aggregates and normalizes millions of data
points from the web freeing companies from restrictive manual processing efforts. This data is then enriched with a
powerful analytics layer delivering unprecedented insights on the fly.
Learn more at www.quadanalytix.com and follow us at @QuadAnalytix
Key Benefits