“We are spending more on promotions than ever before… but we are less sure they are working.” If that thought has crossed your mind in a board meeting, you are not alone — and you are not wrong.
Promotions — discounts, festive bundles, buy-one-get-one offers — have long been the engine of FMCG growth. But in 2026, that engine is sputtering. Across categories, promotional spending is growing significantly faster than base sales, yet actual return on investment is quietly shrinking.
Margins are thinner. Retailers are demanding more trade support. Consumers are aggressively chasing deals — and will drop your brand the second a competitor goes cheaper.
At Insights by Solaris, we see this exact pattern every day. Promotions planned with enormous effort, executed under pressure, reviewed vaguely — and then repeated the following year. The cycle continues because nobody is looking at the full picture.
This guide will show you why your promo ROI is eroding, and how modern FMCG promotional analytics can stop the bleed — and turn every promotion into a calculated, profitable growth driver.
What Is Promotional ROI in FMCG — and Why It Keeps Dropping
The honest diagnosis nobody wants to give
Here is the uncomfortable reality in one sentence: most FMCG companies don’t lack data — they lack a connected understanding of that data.
Your sales numbers arrive a week late. Your retailer’s point-of-sale data is in a completely different format. Finance is tracking trade spend while marketing is celebrating social media impressions. Everyone is staring at their own fragment of the puzzle, and nobody sees the whole.
Because of that disconnect, promo ROI drains away silently:
- Promotions are only analyzed after the money is already spent
- Short-term volume spikes are mistaken for genuine long-term growth
- Product cannibalization is ignored — or politely swept under the rug
- Execution failures at the actual store shelf go completely unnoticed
Many FMCG promotions look highly profitable on a national spreadsheet. Break that same data down by individual SKU and store? A significant portion are quietly losing money — and nobody knows because the numbers are never interrogated at that level.
These are not marketing budget problems. They are financial emergencies. Every promotion you run touches discount funding, trade spend, shelf space investments, and supply chain logistics. When ROI isn’t measured precisely, you are:
- Burning profit margins without acquiring any new loyal customers
- Training your customers to never buy your product at full price
- Frustrating retailers when executions fail at the store level
- Creating artificial demand spikes that cause your supply chain to scramble — leading to out-of-stock shelves and lost sales in the weeks that follow
Why Traditional Promo Planning Has a Structural Flaw
The three dangerous shortcuts brands rely on
Traditionally, promotions got the green light for one of three bad reasons:
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“We did it last year.”
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“Our competitor is running a promo.”
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“We just need to close the month strong.”
Those are not strategies. They are reactions dressed up as decisions. And in an era of compressed margins and empowered consumers, reacting is the most expensive thing a brand can do.
What connected promotional analytics actually changes
Modern promotional analytics doesn’t just tell you what happened — it tells you what will happen, what to fix, and where your money works hardest. It integrates sales data, retailer POS feeds, supply chain signals, and consumer behaviour into a single, real-time view of your promotional universe.
The shift is fundamental: from looking in the rearview mirror to navigating with a live GPS.
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.