Leading Cookware Manufacturer Meyer Corporation Decreases MAP Violations with Automated Monitoring at Scale
For nearly 40 years, Meyer Corporation has been a premier cookware and kitchenware manufacturer in the United States. Brands under the Meyer umbrella include Circulon, Farberware, and Rachel Ray, with products sold in major retailers such as Walmart, Target, Wayfair, Kohl’s, and many more.
Meyer has developed a high-quality brand reputation and market share in the culinary space—but this has also presented a challenge. Meyer must manage its price position and reputation across numerous brands, products, and retailers. For the company, this includes minimum advertised price agreements with retailers to only advertise Meyer brands at or above a set price.
Minimum advertised prices, or MAP policies, are valuable tools for brand manufacturers. However, MAP agreements require cooperation from retailers. This created an important problem Meyer needed to solve.
Challenges
As a cookware manufacturer with multiple brands sold by all major retailers, Meyer had to monitor the prices of its products to ensure that all were advertised and sold in accordance with Meyer’s pricing guidelines.
In addition, Meyer also had to monitor prices across both authorized and unauthorized channels, as sometimes retailers would sell Meyer brands without a formal agreement with the corporation.
Any retailer left unchecked that ignored Meyer’s MAP prices could damage the company’s reputation and erode its price position in the market, not to mention eat into margins.
As a result, Amanda Cantrell, Sales Analyst at Meyer, knew she and her team had to monitor for MAP violations and enforce compliance. Of course, this was easier said than done. Cantrell’s team had to manually scour the web for MAP prices, and as a result, was working with limited and inaccurate data on MAP compliance. This meant the process was time-consuming and data had to be double-checked to ensure accuracy.
Solutions
There had to be a better way to identify MAP violations and enforce compliance across both authorized and unauthorized channels. Cantrell searched for more automated and robust solutions. This is when she began working with Wiser Solutions.
Cantrell was intrigued by Wiser’s ability to monitor large numbers of SKUs across many online marketplaces, quickly identifying MAP violations and providing clear guidance on enforcement. With Wiser, she and Meyer could get better service, more accurate data, and—perhaps most importantly—more data than was possible with a manual workflow.
The solution was to leverage Wiser’s MAP service to monitor high-interest SKUs on a weekly basis at both authorized and unauthorized retailers, then quickly follow up as needed to maintain compliance.
PRODUCTS USED:
Wiser is perfect for our needs at Meyer. We came to them with several complicated thoughts to our MAP policy and they put a team of people dedicated to make it work. And it does!
AMANDA CANTRELL
SALES ANALYST
Results
After working with Wiser for more than a year, Meyer has noticed several positive benefits to its automated MAP monitoring process. For starters, the company’s pain points experienced prior to Wiser have been alleviated. Any issues that were once felt with a manual workflow were gone, as problems are addressed quickly and at scale. Most importantly, MAP violations have decreased. Fewer violations are found on a weekly basis and Meyer’s brand reputation is protected from too-low prices.
Now, Meyer Corporation can manage an excellent MAP policy in the cookware industry that is a benefit not only to the company, but also its retail partners. Gone are the days of manual data collection and inaccurate data, replaced with an automated process that makes it easy to identify violations, report to executives, and enforce compliance.
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