A web-based trade promotion management tool to plan and analyze consumer and retail trade activities.
Duration
3 months (2020)
Role
UX Designer
Client
Fractal.ai
Trade Pulse is a sophisticated web-based trade promotion management and optimization tool crafted to empower FMCG account managers in seamlessly orchestrating trade activities with retail partners and marketing teams.
Following an agile approach, I designed the minimum viable product (MVP) of Trade Pulse by collaborating with a cross-functional team of developers, data scientists, and a project manager.
Context
What is trade promotion?
Trade promotion management is a key part of the FMCG industry, where it plays a vital role in planning retail marketing efforts to make brands more visible, boost sales, and strengthen relationships between manufacturers and retailers. Account managers, or key account managers play a central role in this process. They are responsible for developing trade promotion plans by leveraging their expertise and insights. Their approach is rooted in data-driven insights and consumer behavior analysis with overarching business objectives and revenue targets.
Most common trade promotions include in-store displays, shelf placements, special pricing, demonstrations, and gifting. These strategic initiatives, known as ‘trade plans’, are conceived by account managers and executed collaboratively with marketing teams and retail stakeholders.
Most common trade promotions include in-store displays, shelf placements, special pricing, demonstrations, and gifting. These strategic initiatives, known as ‘trade plans’, are conceived by account managers and executed collaboratively with marketing teams and retail stakeholders.
Current trade promotion process visualized
Project Brief - MVP
The objective was to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) enabling users to efficiently build and monitor multiple trade promotion plans simultaneously, with customizable targets/goals and comprehensive analytical capabilities.
Proposed MVP flow
Strategy & Alignment
The project kicked off with a Strategy & Alignment workshop that involved understanding the technical landscape and the daily routines of the account managers, aligning on product MVP definition, and generating an initial set of user stories to guide design and development.
Process
Building Empathy
Account Managers often grapple with tools like Excel or PowerBI to formulate and refine trade plans within tight deadlines. Daily, they delve into intricate data analysis and perform complex calculations, collaborating closely with leadership and marketing teams to generate actionable reports for trade plan executions. Without real-time data refresh capability in some tools, they have to manually update plans which significantly increases the cognitive load on these managers and often leads to burnout.
Current tools used by account managers (sourced from the internet)
Designing trade plans with existing tools poses significant challenges for account managers.
Empathy Map and Journey Map (tap to view in detail)
