Reaching and connecting with consumers has never been more challenging. Consumers are decreasingly loyal, brands are proliferating, and retail sales pressures are driving new-product failure rates to all-time highs. In these difficult times, focusing on brand and category management processes – while enabling tight alignment with other business processes to grow brand equity, improve brand presence at retail, and increase consumer mindshare – must be a critical component of any consumer products company's go-to-market strategy.

SAP's comprehensive consumer products industry experience and deep business process expertise can help you meet your brand and category management needs. Companies that have integrated brand and category management processes are enabling:

• Strategic planning, including strategy development, category analysis and planning, and baseline volume and revenue planning
• Marketing campaign planning, including coupon campaigns and other direct-to-consumer marketing programs, media and advertising, and other channel-specific marketing programs
• Marketing execution, including creative development, asset fulfillment and distribution, campaign and program management, and marketing funds management

With SAP software and services, you can provide enterprise-wide visibility to your brand strategies and baseline volume forecasts, facilitating both effective marketing campaign planning and sales promotion planning. SAP enables you to define marketing programs to drive incremental volume and align planned campaigns with sales promotions, integrating both with financial planning and demand planning to help reduce out-of-stocks and eliminate lost sales at retail. For your marketing execution processes, SAP software can help you adjust and update budgets, inventory, and distribution in real time – ensuring fast response to market dynamics and full financial transparency into product and brand profitability.

SAP software and our partners can assist you in supporting your annual planning, marketing campaign planning, and marketing execution processes via analysis and reporting. SAP brand and category management software is fully integrated with sales, financial, and supply-chain data, enabling the transparency you need to assess brand profitability and other benchmarks, such as actual spend, revenue, and volume against plan, marketing mix analysis, and campaign effectiveness.

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• Find out more about SAP partner solutions and services.