MAP Compliance vs Brand Compliance: What’s the Difference?

You might be familiar with MAP compliance, but what is brand compliance? This type of compliance monitoring has plenty of ramifications for manufacturers and retailers. 

As you probably know, MAP compliance is the de facto method for most manufacturers to monitor their retail partners. It has long been the standard for one primary reason: simplicity. With hundreds of retailers, thousands of products, and daily price changes, manufacturers can only afford to check a small subset of prices, much less anything else.  

However, there is a challenge with MAP compliance: It only covers a portion of the ways a retailer can portray a brand. The visuals and text retailers use to sell products can destroy manufacturers’ brands and give retailers unfair advantages over their peers (not to mention circumvention of price monitoring: “add to cart to see price,” anyone?). 

Brand compliance enables manufacturers to monitor multiple sources such as visuals, text, and product assortment in addition to monitoring price. MAP compliance is just one of the types of monitoring that make up brand compliance. 

Defining Brand Compliance

Here’s an outline of the different components of brand compliance: 

MAP compliance

• Minimum advertised price violations by merchant and category 
• Record of prices and violations over time 

Promotional compliance 

• Screenshots of homepages, emails, product pages, and social media 
• Searchable text for each of the sources above 

• Example: “10% off [Brand]” or “See price in cart” might not be caught by traditional MAP monitoring solutions 

Assortment compliance 

• A record of every product offered by each retailer over time 
• Monitoring of product availability and new product introductions 

Why Brand Compliance Matters

Brand compliance provides a much broader range of monitoring, takes less time, and costs less than manual MAP compliance efforts. Manufacturers can completely assure that their brands are being presented properly without doubling their compliance team size. Retailers can be confident that they’re not fighting an unfair advantage and are getting the best deal possible from their suppliers. 

We have pioneered brand compliance and offer the only combination of these tools on the market today. We’re passionate about saving people time and offering effective solutions for eCommerce companies. Contact us today to understand how we can help you improve your current MAP compliance efforts. 

Editor’s Note: Contributing writers are Baxter Roberson and Matt Ellsworth. This post was originally published in April 2015 and has since been updated and refreshed for readability and accuracy.