Let’s start with a slightly uncomfortable truth that most FMCG leaders are thinking, even if they don’t say it out loud in board meetings:
“We are spending more money on promotions than ever before… but we are less sure they are actually working.”
If you feel this way, you aren’t crazy. Promotions—discounts, festive bundles, buy-one-get-one offers—have always been the engine of FMCG growth. But lately, the engine is sputtering. In many categories, promotional spending is growing much faster than base sales, yet the actual Return on Investment (ROI) is dropping.
Margins are thinner. Retailers are demanding more trade support. Consumers are actively chasing deals but will drop your brand the second a competitor offers a cheaper price.
At Insights by Solaris, we see this exact pattern every single day. Promotions are planned with a ton of effort, executed under massive pressure, and reviewed vaguely. Then, the cycle repeats. Brands just do what they did last year and hope for better results.
But hope is not a business strategy. Let’s talk about why your promo ROI is dropping, and how real, connected data can quietly save the day.
The Real Reason Your Promotions Are Losing Money
Here is the honest truth in one paragraph: Most FMCG companies don’t lack data. They lack a connected understanding of that data.
Your sales numbers arrive a week late. The retailer’s point-of-sale data is in a totally different format. Your finance team is tracking trade spend, while your marketing team is celebrating social media impressions. Everyone is looking at their own little piece of the puzzle, but nobody sees the whole picture.
Because of this disconnect, promo ROI quietly drains away:
○ Promotions are only analyzed after the money is already spent.
○ Short-term volume spikes are mistaken for actual, long-term success.
○ Product cannibalization is ignored (or politely swept under the rug).
○ Execution failures on the actual store shelf go completely unnoticed.
Solaris Reality Check: Many FMCG promotions look incredibly profitable when you view them on a national spreadsheet. But when you break the data down by specific SKUs and individual stores? They are actually losing money.
Why Promo ROI is a Financial Emergency
We need to stop treating promotions like simple marketing campaigns. They are massive financial commitments.
Think about it. Every single promotion you run touches your discount funding, trade spend, shelf space investments, and supply chain logistics. When your ROI isn’t clear, you aren’t just wasting marketing budget. You are:
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Burning through your profit margins without acquiring any new, loyal customers.
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Accidentally training your customers to never buy your product at full price.
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Frustrating your retailers when your promotions fail to execute at the store level.
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Creating massive, artificial demand spikes that cause your supply chain to scramble, leading to out-of-stock shelves.
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In today’s brutal FMCG market, every promotion needs a concrete, mathematical reason to exist. Analytics provides that reason.
The 4 Steps to Fixing Your Promo Strategy
Traditionally, promotions got the green light for bad reasons: "We did it last year," "Our competitor is doing it," or "We just need to close the month strong." Those aren't strategies; they are reactions. Better analytics allows you to move from reacting to predicting. Here is how Insights by Solaris helps brands flip the script:
1. Find Your Real Baseline
One of the biggest mistakes in FMCG is assuming that all sales during a promotion are new sales. If you don't know your baseline (what you would have sold anyway, without the discount), you are inflating your success. Analytics separates your natural everyday demand and seasonal uplifts from your true promotional impact.
2. Stop Cannibalizing Products
Many promotions don’t actually grow your brand's market share; they just move your volume around. Maybe customers stopped buying your standard pack and stocked up on your discounted family pack. Maybe they bought three months' worth of product in one week (forward buying), meaning your sales will be dead for the next quarter. Advanced analytics spots this cannibalization early so you can design promotions that actually create new demand, not just rearrange it.
3. Get Down to the Store Level
Not all retail stores behave the same way. Yet, many brands push the exact same promotion across every single store nationwide. With store-level analytics, you can cluster stores based on how consumers actually respond. You might find that a 15% discount with great shelf placement in a suburban grocery store heavily outperforms a 25% discount hidden in the back of an urban convenience store. When you understand store reality, you stop pushing copy-paste deals and start investing where the ROI is strongest.
4. Forecast Before You Fund
Stop waiting until a promotion is over to figure out if it worked. Before you launch, use data to ask smarter questions: What is our expected incremental volume? How much of a discount do we actually need to move the needle? Predicting what won’t work often saves a brand more money than scaling what does.
The Bottom Line
In FMCG, promotions can’t be a gamble anymore. The margins are too tight, and the competition is too fierce. The brands that win the shelf aren’t the ones with the loudest, most expensive promotions—they are the ones with the best-run promotions.
At Insights by Solaris, we believe your data should guide you before you launch, support you during execution, and give you brutal honesty after it’s over. When you build your promotions on insight instead of instinct, they stop being risky bets and finally become reliable growth engines.