Demand Shaping

Would you like to have influence over the demand for your products?

Demand shaping is the objective and measurable influencing of demand to optimize the profitability of planned supply. The basic components of demand shaping include pricing optimization, new product introduction, and promotion and marketing management.  Demand Foresight’s Demand Commander software offers a complete suite of demand shaping functionality to help you fine tune your demand planning in order to support strategic objectives, achieve financial goals, and intelligently balance your entire value chain.

Pricing Optimization

Demand Commander provides a single solution that delivers the right mix of analytics, pricing science, and workflow that enable functional groups to work in concert with each other. It allows them to perform their own price-related planning, selling, and tracking processes and allows the organization to focus on pricing decisions within the bigger context of the overall demand plan and S&OP process.

Demand Commander helps companies price with confidence by blending pricing science, business rules, and price/revenue strategy for effective pricing and revenue optimization.

  • Pricing Science – Including price elasticity, seasonality, trends, cannibalization, and affinity.
  • Business Rules – Incorporation of margin targets, competitive posture, private label relationships, ending numbers, price change limits, and more.
  • Pricing Strategies – Configure to any level of product hierarchy, leverage predefined strategies, or customize and drive your price profile.

Demand Commander features include:

  • Scenario planning
  • On-Demand “what-if” simulation
  • Pre-configured pricing strategies
  • Customizable pricing strategies
  • Competitive positioning
  • Price profile alignment
  • Price Family management
  • Key Value Item management
  • Actionable reporting and insight

Company’s today face a number of pricing optimization challenges such as rising costs, consumer sensitivity to price, and pressure on margins. Demand Commander helps address these challenges and help measurably improve performance in areas you can measure:

  • Predict customer behavior
  • Achieve financial objectives
  • Improve customer loyalty
  • Make better pricing decisions

New Product Introduction

New product introductions are a critical business competency.

  • Get it wrong and damage can last for years: revenue comes up short, brands are tarnished, and competitive advantages are lost.
  • Get it right, however, and you can build a virtuous cycle of business improvement.

Demand Commander provides complete functionality to manage all three major types of new product introductions. As you progress from one to the other, there is less modeling support a system can provide to support your professionals. But, no matter the type of product introduction, a system can and should be able to provide great value in supporting the practices/processes and disciplines that are the hallmark of companies that do product intros well.

Replacement Product Intros

The most common type of new product intro is the “Replacement” introduction: the new and improved, longer-lasting, better performing version of an existing product. Demand Commander provides comprehensive template functionality to plan, execute, and monitor key activities such as product history, replacement history, money supporting the launch, the time of year, the weather, the demographics, competitive activity, and overall market growth to name a few. All of this information and more should be used as a profile input to the introduction within the system in order to provide a more accurate forecast for the launch.

Completely New Product Intros

The second type of new product intro is a completely new product. It is consistent with your overall line of business (for example, a new type of paper if you are paper company or a new speaker if you are a speaker company) but it is new – not replacing an existing product. Perhaps the product is getting you to a new price point or market demographic and there is less data and therefore less modeling support that can be provided by a forecasting/planning system. Demand Commander provides a flexible group of wizards to allow a company to ensure there is rigor and consistency used to think through the components and to use the platform to the maximum degree possible. Wizards can be used to ensure the team thinks through the market size and its growth, the competitive landscape, the market share you are targeting, the budget behind the launch, past similar launches, potential cannibalization of existing products etc. With this information, a decent forecast can be produced and used to ensure operational and product support and to monitor the launch so that you can support in the optimal manner.

New Product, New Market Intros

Lastly, there is the new product in a new market type of new product introductions. Here, even less experience and data exists than the prior types and so there is less that the computer can do to help. But it is still critical to accurately forecast the performance of the launch. Demand Commander has a series of wizards/templates to ensure that the data that is available is used to the best possible advantage. Information again such as the market size and growth, your desired market share, and launch budget are examples of useful information you do have. These can be used to model best case/worst case scenarios, impacts on your existing business and, in general, gain a common understanding within the business of what needs to be done, what are the probable outcomes, and make sure that the supply side is as prepared as possible to support it.

Demand Commander also focuses on providing an understanding of how well demand is on track – right now – to hit projections: exceeding or falling short. Typically, this is accomplished best by utilizing downstream data inputs (like VMI or Point of Sale data) that sense what is happening on the front lines (thank you Gartner/AMR). This needs to happen in as close to real-time as possible so you can react/adjust before too much damage is done if the product launch veers to far from the plan.

So when thinking about forecasting and planning for new product introductions, Demand Foresight’s Demand Commander supports different types of introductions, reinforces the need for quality information, strengthens process and discipline, helps manage the performance of the introduction, and generally provides the platform to help your professionals to succeed in this critical business activity.

Promotion & Marketing Management

Promotions & Marketing Management is a challenge faced by most companies around the globe. Key professionals are responsible for developing and implementing programs which deliver the maximum return on investment and manages the tradeoff between incremental volume, necessary margin, and maintenance of a reasonable level of trade spend.

Demand Commander provides complete functionality in order to fully manage this process to:

  • Review High Level Plan
  • Manage Range of Products
  • Manage Base Volumes
  • Define Trading Terms
  • Review Base Account Plan
  • View Promotion Events & Incremental Volume
  • Refine Promotional Events
  • Monitor & Analyze Impacts

During this process we help deal with the complexities of large product portfolios, phasing in and out new/old products, various retailer types with unique discounts, trading terms, ranging & display processes. We then extend the capability of an organization to consider the effects of marketing and promotion on other key stakeholders within the business such as Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Finance, Merchandising, and Sales.