Promotion start

The promotion begins on Monday, and Monday cannot be made up. Promotional goods are missing from the shelf more often than any other goods, on average across the promotion for nine to eleven percent of items, and in the first days the out-of-shelf rate is above 15 percent, as ECR Europe measured in grocery retail. The most difficult days are the first ones, and it is precisely on them that advertising has brought customers into the store.

The causes have been known for as long as the figures have existed. The promotional quantity is underestimated and too little is ordered, a late change to the promotion plan misses the order cycle, the goods arrive and stay on the pallet in the stockroom, or the shelf label is missing. Cortex reads the promotion calendar, promotional stock, delivery status and setup status per store at the same cadence and shows on the day before the start which promotion begins tomorrow and is not yet ready today.

Readiness

Ready means more than delivered. The goods are in the store and in the intended place, the price on the shelf is the price at the checkout, the display is set up, and the staff know what is running. Cortex checks each of these points against planogram, price file, stock and task status and tracks a readiness level per promotion and store that does not stop at delivery.

The check runs before the start, not after. What is missing the day before goes to the role in the store as a task with item, location, deadline and reason, in the order of the footfall that will pass the area tomorrow. The promotional area is full when the first customers of the promotion arrive, and not at noon on the second day.

Price is a case of its own. A promotional price that is missing from the shelf or deviates from the checkout costs trust and complaints and carries legal risks. In the US, where authorities check in-store price accuracy, 23 percent of the stores inspected failed to meet the requirements in 2024. In the German-speaking region, only 27 percent of retailers used electronic shelf labels across all stores in the same year, 45 percent not at all yet, so the promotional price mostly reaches the shelf by hand. Cortex compares price file, shelf label status and checkout price per promotional item and reports the deviation before the first customer finds it at the checkout.

Execution

Agreed is not set up. The secondary placement is in the plan with display type, location and period, in the store it stands in the wrong aisle, a day later or not at all. Cortex compares the target plan with the setup status and with the footfall and sell-through at the area and detects the display that is up and sells nothing, and the one that never went up.

Supplier-funded displays and promotions are a contract, and the consideration is the setup in the store at the agreed time. Cortex tracks per agreement the active promotion days, the setup status per store and the revenue per display, and keeps ready the proof the supplier wants to see. Trade marketing revenue thus no longer depends on whether someone in the store has checked.

Proof

Availability on the start day, plan-versus-actual revenue, price error rate, correction time and execution per display are tracked per promotion and store, against the course of the previous weeks and against the stores in which the promotion was ready. The difference between a promotion that was in place on the first day and one that was put in place on the third thus gets a number.

Across the network, it becomes clear which store keeps its promotions, which product group is regularly missing at the start and where the gap begins not in the store but in the order quantity. The next promotion starts with what the last one showed, and the promotion day turns from a date in the calendar into a state that can be checked before it arrives.