Promotion optimisation:
Uplift is not incrementality
The standard evaluation of a promotion is uplift, less an allowance for cannibalisation. Everything else goes uncounted: subsidisation, retail switching, stockpiling, downgrading of shopper spend. Accuris measures every source of promotional volume and reports true net incrementality by category, retailer, brand and product.
£11
of every £100 of promotional spend generates new demand for the category
35%
of promoted volume is sold to loyal shoppers who would have paid full price
12%
of promotional uplift is offset by lost sales elsewhere in the supplier's own portfolio
01
Measure Net Incrementality
Every promotional event is decomposed into its Source of Business™: the volume that would have sold anyway, the volume borrowed from other packs, other weeks and other stores, and the volume that is new to the category. The result is a promotional P&L per event that shows what the promotion earned, not what it appeared to earn.
02
Diagnose the Hidden Costs
We quantify subsidisation, cannibalisation, stockpiling and retail switching for every pack, mechanic and retailer, and separate the switching that builds value (upgrading to premium, scaling up pack size) from the switching that destroys it (downgrading, and discounts to shoppers who never needed one). You see precisely why a promotion under-performed and which lever to change.
03
Perfect Promo Plan
Clear, quantified plan with detail on what to stop, what to scale and where to invest differently: which packs to promote and which to protect, the discount depth each margin can bear, the mechanics that encourage value upgrading, and the frequency that stops training shoppers to wait. Delivered as an optimised plan by retailer and promotional slot, ready for the next negotiation.
04
Embed and Track
Monthly performance tracking keeps the plan honest as the market moves. Every new event is decomposed as it lands, benchmarked against more than forty grocery categories and fed back into the next planning cycle. Competitor promotions are tracked the same way, so you learn from theirs as well as your own.
Source of Business™: the discipline behind the solution
Accuris pioneered Source of Business® and has refined it for more than two decades. The principle is simple to state and demanding to deliver: every movement in sales can be decomposed into the sources that produced it. There are seven. A loyal base that would have bought anyway. A subsidised base, the same loyal demand bought at a discount it never required. Stockpiling, which borrows from future weeks. Cannibalisation within your own portfolio. Competitive switching, won from rival brands. Retail switching, won from other stores. And category expansion, consumption that is new. Only category expansion and upgrading reliably create lasting value. The rest move existing demand from one place to another.
Seven Sources, One Number
Source of Business® nets every source off against the headline uplift to produce net incrementality: the number a promotion should be judged on. Applied to every event, it shows which promotions grow the category, which merely redistribute it, and which pay shoppers to do what they were going to do anyway.
Built for Real Data
The methodology runs on standard retailer scanning data. It does not depend on household panels, which are too thin at SKU level to measure switching reliably. A patent-pending Bayesian model handles sparse, seasonal and heavily promoted data, covers every SKU rather than a sample, and sharpens as evidence accumulates.
Diagnostic, Not Black Box
Every result can be traced to the switching that produced it. Commercial teams see why a promotion worked or failed, and what to change, rather than receiving an optimised plan they cannot interrogate or defend in front of a retailer.
This will improve your next promotional plan
True promotional P&L by Event
A gross-to-net waterfall for every promotion: the do-nothing profit you would have earned regardless, the fixed promotional costs, then subsidisation, cannibalisation, stockpiling and retail switching, netted off to the value the event created. A headline +100 of gross profit regularly ends at a negative number once every hidden cost is counted. This is the document that settles which promotions to keep, internally and with the retailer.
Switching Diagnostic
For every promoted pack: who switched, from what, and whether they ended up spending more or less. Upgrading and downgrading are quantified in currency, by retailer and by mechanic, so the promotions that move shoppers to higher-value products can be identified and repeated, and the ones that teach them to trade down can be redesigned. It also produces the evidence retailers respond to: how much of the uplift grew their category rather than moving it between stores.
Promo Efficiency Quadrant
Every promoted pack is assigned one of four strategic roles, based on its volume lift and its margin return:
-
Efficiency Drivers - High volume lift AND high margin ROI. Protect and optimise.
-
Volume Drivers - High lift, low ROI. Use strategically; cap frequency.
-
Brand Builders - Low lift, high ROI. Deploy for margin enhancement.
-
Subsidisers - Low lift AND low ROI. Redirect spend to higher-performing packs.
Optimised Plan and Monthly Tracking
An optimised promotional calendar by retailer and slot, specifying packs, discount depth, mechanics and display support, with the projected net incremental value of each event. Delivered in an interactive Power BI environment that tracks every campaign monthly, monitors competitor activity and lets teams test what-if scenarios before the next negotiation.
Why Accuris?
Promotion analytics is available from syndicated data providers, from strategy consultancies and from a growing number of boutiques. Accuris differs from all three in ways that show up in the results.
Accuris created Source of Business®, turned it into a management discipline and remains the only firm that measures all seven sources at true granularity: by product, by week, by promotion, by retailer. It is not a feature bolted onto a general analytics platform.
The firm that defined the discipline
Accuris does one thing: revenue management analytics for FMCG, across promotions, pricing and assortment. Senior practitioners do the work, and the people who diagnose your promotions are the people who stay through implementation.
Specialists, not generalists
We take the data you already have, decompose every event and return quantified recommendations within weeks. The output is a working plan and a monthly tracking system, not a one-off report that ages the moment the project team leaves.
From diagnosis to action, in weeks
A reference base of more than forty grocery categories and two decades of decomposition across Europe, validated by IGD, ECR Europe and ECR D.A.CH. Every result you see is placed against what "good" looks like in your category.
Benchmarked at scale
20+
years pioneering Source of Business®
2/3rds
of Europe's top 20 FMCG
manufacturers partnered
40+
grocery categories in the Accuris benchmark database
250+
promo optimisation projects in more than 20 countries