AI brings more accurate promotional planning and forecasting to life

Whether trying to eliminate ineffective promos, optimize category spend, or improve forecast accuracy, SymphonyAI’s promotion planning and promotional forecasting will help you develop a better course of action.

30M

Average wasted spend per $1B in revenue

20%

Increased forecast accuracy

Immediate improvement opportunity per $1B in revenue

Don’t guess. Use AI to know.

All too often, retailers simply repeat the same promotional plans week after week, year after year. Why? Because it’s safer to ‘do no harm’ than to make adjustments with uncertain outcomes. SymphonyAI’s retail promotion planning and promotional forecasting eliminates the guesswork and improves the ROI.

AI/ML: A better way to plan and forecast

Basic regression models are a thing of the past. Or at least they should be. With so many factors impacting promotional effectiveness in an omnichannel world, using AI/ML is the only way to truly build accurate promotional plans that provide category managers the confidence to make changes needed to stop wasting millions in promotional spend.

With our Promotion Planning and Forecasting solution, Category managers are armed with what-if scenario analyses, decision parameters, and process guardrails that allow them to combine Human Intelligence with Artificial Intelligence to select the best possible actions.

Customer-centric in every way

Whether online, in a mobile app, or via a traditional paper mailer, customers still rely on promotional flyers to guide their shopping decisions – from which store to visit to which item to buy.

We’ve developed unique features tailored to FMCG – from our seamlessly integrated FACTS^TM customer segmentations to our AI-powered Ad-Responder models and other constraint-based guardrails. Whether the goal is to increase the ROI on expensive front-page items or identify the category- and item-specific tactics that will best drive incrementality after switching, retailers and manufacturers can make decisions more confidently than ever.

Enhanced Retailer-CPG collaboration

Today, retailer-CPG collaboration is more important than ever. Rather than fighting over how to ‘divide the pie,’ they need to work together to ‘grow the pie’ in the face of omnichannel pressures.

Our retail promotion planning and promotional forecasting solution facilitate these efforts through a ‘single source of truth’ that provides streamlined, workflow-driven discussions between CPG account teams and retailer merchants and category management. An integrated audit trail for plans, events, and promotions also ensures greater accountability across categories and departments.

Workflow enablement and productivity

Promotional ad planning is one of the most time-consuming activities in retail. It requires analysis, coordination, negotiation, funding, planning, and executing – every week. In fact, ‘time’ is one of the reasons that retailers often just repeat last year’s plan.

Our retail promotion planning and promotional forecasting solution are built with these constraints in mind. ML is used to process models more quickly, and AI recommends optimized plans. An integrated calendar-based approach enhances visualization and decision making, while critical but repetitive tasks such as circular development and item placement are simplified thanks to an automatic allocation engine that uses business rules to improve productivity.

For more than six years SymphonyAI and REWE jointly built customer-centric solutions in the areas of direct marketing, pricing, promotion and assortment optimization

Hilmar Huebers Chief Customer and Analytics Officer