Never reached the shelf

In the FMCG seat a November promotion is a line in a trade agreement long before it is anything a shopper sees.

The brand funds a discount. The money leaves as a trade discount to the distributor, or a promotional allowance to the retailer, with a plan attached: the shelf price comes down by this much for these weeks, a shelf talker goes up, the shopper gets the difference. Everyone signs. The invoice is cut.

Then I would walk into a supermarket in Cairo in the middle of the promotion, and the price on the shelf had not moved.

Not always. But often enough, and in a clear enough pattern, that I stopped treating it as a mistake. In a devaluing currency every link in the chain is carrying a wound. The distributor's margin was eaten by the last exchange rate move. The retailer's was eaten by the one before. A promotional allowance arriving in that chain looks like a repair long before it looks like a shopper's discount. So it is applied where it hurts, to the margin, and the shelf keeps the old number, and the shopper never learns there was an offer.

The brand's report says the promotion ran. The distributor's says the funds were received. The retailer's says the display went up. All three are true. The only person who did not get the promotion is the one it was for.

Nobody measures pass-through. It needs someone standing in front of shelves across a city, and it produces an answer that embarrasses three parties at once. So the one number that would say whether the money reached the shopper is the number nobody in the chain is paid to collect.

A trade promotion here can succeed completely, for the distributor, for the retailer, for the activity report, and fail only at the shelf.

The promotion worked perfectly for everyone who was not the customer.