Part III, The Craft · Chapter 14

The New Gatekeepers

Trade marketing promotions: how to win retailer support when the retailer runs the promotion

The buyer who wanted a Harley

There is a story that has been told in this trade for years, and we tell it the way it was told to us. A team from one of the big multinationals took a tea brand’s promotional plans to a supermarket buyer. They had done the work. There was a raft of ideas, every one of them unique, on brand, tied to the brand’s sustainability story and built to move boxes. The buyer went through them politely and did not like any of them. What the buyer did like was Harley-Davidsons. Why not give away a Harley, and some Harley gear?

So that is what ran: a motorbike, with no connection to tea, to the brand or to sustainability. And it went very well, for one reason. The buyer loved it, so it got floor space, and plenty of it: displays, ends and support in store that none of the on-brand ideas would have earned. Shoppers who would never have read a sustainability message walked past a stack of tea with a motorbike on it, and bought tea.

It is not a story about taste. It is a story about who decides. In our experience, retailer visibility is worth more than any brand message, because a message nobody sees does nothing, and the retailer decides what gets seen. The Harley pleased the buyer and the shopper and did very little for the brand, and it still sold tea, which tells you how much that first yes is worth. That does not mean the brand gives up. It means every promotion has four people to look after at once, and the order matters: please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper, reward the consumer. Most promotions do one or two of those well. The good ones do all four. No wonder the people who do this for a living are tired.

Four People, One Promotion

Please the retailer: visibility, traffic and a reason to back it on the floor. Support the brand: the job it was hired for and the sentence it will be remembered by, with nothing that cheapens it. Encourage the shopper: the three seconds, with a reward worth wanting, odds worth believing and friction worth the effort. Reward the consumer: the person who uses the product, who is not always the person who bought it (chapter 1). A promotion that pleases only the retailer is a giveaway. A promotion that pleases only the brand never reaches the floor.

One promotion, five gatekeepers

Pleasing the retailer has grown more organised since then. From 1 February to 30 April 2025, anyone in Australia who spent $20 or more on Jack Daniel’s in one transaction could enter the receipt for a one-in-seven chance of an instant prize: a digital prepaid Mastercard worth $5, $20, $100 or $250, close to half a million of them in all. That part of Now or Never is for the shopper, and it is a good piece of design. One in seven reads as possible. A five-dollar card is small, but it is a win today, which is what the Accountant wants, and the higher prizes give the Gambler something to hope for.

The part worth stopping on is underneath. Brown-Forman’s published terms list five separate major draws, each for $10,000, and each one belongs to a retailer group. One is drawn from entries at Endeavour’s stores: BWS, Dan Murphy’s and Jimmy Brings. One from Coles Liquor: Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice. One from the Independent Brands Australia banners, such as Cellarbrations, The Bottle-O and IGA Liquor. One from LMG’s Bottlemart, Sip’n Save and Thirsty Camel. And one from the other independent stores.

The shopper barely needs to know. The draws are not there for the shopper. They are there for five category managers, each of whom can now present the promotion to their own store network as theirs: our customers, our draw, our winner. One idea for the person in the aisle, five versions for the people who decide whether the aisle carries it. Promo-Monitor, the independent tracker quoted throughout this book, picked it out as an example of one promotional platform adapted across several retailer groups “without fragmenting the core consumer proposition”. That is the craft of this chapter in a sentence.

What is trade marketing, and who is the gatekeeper?

Trade marketing is the work a brand does with and through its retailers to win the shelf: ranging, display, catalogue, price, and the promotions that make the case for all of them. A trade marketing promotion is one built for the retailer as much as for the shopper. Every chapter so far has been about the shopper’s three seconds. This one is about the meeting that comes before them, where someone decides whether the shopper gets to see the promotion at all.

For most of the history of this trade the gatekeeper was the category manager, or the buyer, and the test was the one we have used for years, S.O.S. Is it simple: can a store team member explain it to a customer in one breath? Is it operational: does it cost the store anything in time, space, stock, training or point-of-sale it does not already have? And does it sell: will it grow the category, or just move shoppers from one brand to another on the same shelf? A promotion that fails any of the three does not get a no. It gets a polite yes and a bad position, which is worse.

Chapter 6 put this inside the Venue fader: where the game is physically met, and who has to say yes for it to be met there. That definition has not changed. What has changed is who is saying yes, and what they now want in return.

When the retailer runs the promotion

In Australian liquor, the gatekeeper has become an operator. Promo-Monitor counted the liquor store promotions it could find each year from 2022 to 2025. The total barely moved, from 649 to 646. The number run by retailers themselves went from 94 to 222, and 189 of those 222 were run on behalf of supplier brands. In the first half of 2026 retailers ran 128 of the 262 promotions the tracker found, very nearly half, and three retailer groups, Star Liquor, LMG and Hotel and Tourism Management, ran close to seven in ten of those. These are counts of promotions, not of results, but the direction is not in doubt.

The groups do it differently, which matters more than the totals. In 2025 LMG was the largest host of promotions in the count, with 125, and suppliers ran most of them, 93 as exclusive deals across its banners. Liquor Barons ran 54 promotions for suppliers and hosted no supplier-run exclusives at all: for an exclusive in its stores, it runs the promotion. Star Liquor ran 46 itself, 45 of them for supplier brands. Three groups, three operating models, and a brand that treats them alike will get at least two of them wrong.

When the retailer runs it, the retailer chooses more than the shelf. Promo-Monitor found that retailer-run promotions for supplier brands were 86 per cent draws, mostly entered by scanning the retailer’s loyalty card. So the retailer also chooses the mechanic, the entry route and who keeps the data. The brand pays, supplies the product and often the prize, and rents a seat at a table it does not own. That is not a complaint. It is a good trade for reach, and for a mid-sized brand it can be the only door into a few hundred stores. But it is a trade, and it should be made on purpose.

Loyalty cards and retail media networks

Behind the operator sits the loyalty card. Woolworths reported 10.8 million Everyday Rewards members in Australia at the end of its 2026 financial year. Coles reported 10.3 million active Flybuys members. Endeavour reported 5.6 million active My Dan’s members and a scan rate of 84 per cent. In liquor, the share of promotions entered by scanning a loyalty card rose from 18.6 per cent in 2022 to 30.2 per cent in 2025, which chapter 11 read as a data problem for brands. Here it is a power shift: the retailer knows who bought, and the brand mostly does not.

The retailers have turned that knowledge into a business. A retail media network sells brands access to the retailer’s shoppers: screens in store, placements in the app and on the website, emails, sponsored search and promotions entered with the card. Woolworths’ Cartology grew revenue by 7.8 per cent in the 2026 financial year; Coles reported that its retail media income, Coles 360, grew by 10 per cent. Neither publishes how much of that is promotional, and we will not guess. What matters for a promotion is that it can now be bought as part of a media package, priced by the retailer, run on the retailer’s systems and reported back in the retailer’s terms.

Used well, that is reach no brand could build on its own. Used carelessly, it is a promotion the brand paid for and learned nothing from. Chapter 11 has the move: add a brand-owned step, a bonus entry or a reward claimed on the brand’s own page, so that the shoppers who want more from the brand can choose to give it their name. Agree in the trading terms, before launch, what the brand will receive afterwards: entries by store and week, sales by store, redemption by prize. A report you did not ask for is a report you will not get.

Who pays for the promotion

Since 1 April 2025 the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct has been mandatory for the largest grocery businesses: Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Metcash. Among other things it sets rules on promotions. A covered retailer must not require a supplier to fund part or all of the cost of a promotion unless the grocery supply agreement expressly provides for it and the funding is reasonable. Where the supplier is funding a promotion, the retailer must give reasonable written notice before holding it, must not cancel or cut a promotional order by more than a set margin without consent, notice or compensation, and must not over-order at the promotional price. Penalties for a breach can reach 10 per cent of annual turnover. This is general information, not legal advice, and the code covers some retailers and not others.

The practical point is simpler than the law. If a promotion is going to be funded by the brand, it belongs in the trading terms, written down, with what each side contributes and what each side receives. That protects the brand. It also protects the category manager, who can say yes to a promotion that has been agreed properly far more easily than to one that arrives as a favour.

How to get retailer support for a promotion

Every move below starts from the same place as the Harley: the retailer is a business with its own job to do, and a promotion that helps the brand at the retailer’s expense will not be carried, however good the idea.

Ask before you build. The Harley story is funny because the team found out what the buyer wanted after the work was done. Take the job and two or three rough routes to the category manager early, and ask what would earn the floor. The answer may be dull, and it may be a motorbike. It is still worth knowing before anything is built.

Give the retailer its own layer. Jack Daniel’s five draws show it at full scale: one promotion, a prize that belongs to each group. The same thinking works smaller. A retailer-only bonus prize, an extra entry for card holders, a range only that group carries. The shopper sees one idea; each gatekeeper sees something that is theirs.

Run on the retailer’s systems, not around them. Chapter 8’s Aperol offer let people register for a barcode and scan it at a BWS counter to collect a free spritz. The store did nothing it did not already know how to do. A promotion that needs a new process at the register, a stack of forms or a staff briefing fails the operational test before it reaches the shelf.

Sell the category, not only the brand. A category manager is judged on the whole shelf. A threshold that lifts the basket, a pairing with a complementary product, a reason to visit that store rather than another: these are things a retailer wants for its own sake. A promotion that only moves shoppers from the brand next door is, to the retailer, a cost.

Choose the route before the mechanic. Promo-Monitor’s advice for a brief that needs reach is “a route decision, not a mechanic decision: choose where it runs before what it is.” Decide whether the promotion is exclusive to one group, for commitment, or runs across several, for reach, and design from there. Every one of the twelve suppliers the report treats as leaders had run a promotion of its own across two or more retailer groups; among the other suppliers, 21.9 per cent had. Exclusive deals buy depth with one partner. Running across groups keeps the brand from depending on any single one.

Bring what the retailer cannot make. The retailer has the shopper and the data. The brand brings the idea, the prize, the story and the engine that makes the promise safe: fulfilment, verification and the cover chapter 7 described. A promotion pitched as “we will run it, you just stock it” is easier to say yes to than one that asks the retailer to build anything.

Tell them the sentence. Chapter 13’s test applies in the buyer’s office as much as in the pub. If the category manager cannot repeat the idea to their own team in one sentence, it will not reach the store team intact, and the store team is the last gatekeeper of all.

Measuring a promotion by retailer

A promotion run through several retailers is several promotions, and should be read that way. Sales by retailer group and by store, from the brand’s own sell-out data or the retailer’s scan data, are the first measure, set against the same stores in the weeks before and after, and against stores that did not carry it. Entries by group show where the idea was met and acted on; they are purchases the promotion can see, not uplift. And the retailer’s own report, if the trading terms asked for one, shows what the brand could not see for itself.

Two cautions. Channels are not comparable footprints: Endeavour reported 1,451 BWS stores in its 2026 annual report, and Coles 988 liquor stores across all its liquor banners, so a straight comparison of totals mostly measures the number of doors. And a retailer’s report measures the retailer’s view of the promotion; it is evidence, not a verdict. Chapter 15 is about putting all of it together into the number a promotion is finally judged on.

Where this leaves the brief

A brief that ignores the retailer is a brief for a promotion that will be designed twice: once by the brand, and again by the category manager who has to carry it. Add five questions to the first page. Whose shelf is it on? Whose card does the shopper scan? Who runs the promotion, and who keeps the data? Who pays, and is it written into the trading terms? And what does this retailer get from it that its rival does not? The answers do not decide the idea. They decide whether the idea is ever met. Then put the idea against the four people it has to look after: does it please the retailer, support the brand, encourage the shopper and reward the consumer? If one of the four is missing, say which, and decide on purpose whether to live with it.

The next chapter is about the question that sits underneath every one of these: what did the promotion actually sell, and how would anyone know?