What is MAP Monitoring?

Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) monitoring allows brands to track product pricing across retailers and enforce consistent MAP policies. For consumer brands, monitoring MAP compliance has become essential for maintaining price consistency, brand prestige, and fair retail competition.

The Growing Importance of MAP Policies

MAP policies set a lowest price that retailers can advertise and sell a supplier‘s products. Monitoring MAP compliance ensures retailers abide by these terms.

MAP policies have been widely adopted across industries. In a recent survey, 78% of consumer product manufacturers have MAPs in place today. The most common product categories include:

• Consumer electronics – 95% have MAP
• Home appliances – 89%
• Power tools – 86%
• Fitness equipment – 82%

As competition has increased online, MAP policies have become vital for major brands in enforcing consistent pricing across channels.

Why Brands Rely on MAP Monitoring

Brands implement MAP agreements for several strategic reasons:

• Maintain Brand Prestige – Drastic price fluctuations can devalue brands in consumers‘ minds. MAP policies help control pricing so brands remain prestige.
• Promote Fair Competition – MAP prevents larger retailers from undercutting prices and pushing smaller sellers out of the market.
• Protect Profit Margins – Consistent pricing protects retailers‘ margins and incentives to carry products.
• Avoid Price Erosion – Without MAP, retailers may engage in price wars that can harm long-term brand value.

As ecommerce grows, monitoring MAP compliance is more critical than ever for brands to realize these benefits in competitive retail environments.

Drivers of MAP Non-Compliance

With so much potential value, why would retailers ever violate MAP agreements? There are two primary reasons:

• Competitive Pressures – To gain market share, retailers may slash prices below MAP levels to undercut competitors.
• Unauthorized Resellers – When inventory gets into the hands of 3rd parties, they often discount products well below MAP.

Identifying and stopping MAP violators preserves the integrity of brands‘ pricing strategies. Advanced monitoring tools can help uncover unauthorized sellers.

Comparing Monitoring Approaches

So how can brands monitor constantly changing market prices? Essentially, there are two options:

Manual Monitoring

• Physically check prices across retailers on a regular basis
• Document violations, contact retailers, and enforce policy
• Very time consuming and inefficient, especially for large brands

Automated Monitoring

• Use web scraping bots to monitor prices across channels
• Automated alerts flag policy violations as they occur
• Dashboards display real-time MAP compliance data
• Far more efficient and effective than manual process

For most brands today, automating MAP monitoring is the only viable scalable solution.

Leading Monitoring Tools

Here is an overview of leading software tools for automated MAP monitoring:

Factors like number of tracked SKUs, support level, and data sources impact pricing. But automation delivers major time savings versus manual monitoring.

How Automated Tools Monitor MAP

Specialized web scraping bots can gather pricing data from retailer sites and API feeds. Key features like:

• Initial retailer discovery and product matchings
• Daily scrape updates with custom scheduling
• Automated violation flagging based on MAP rules
• History tracking of pricing trends over time

These capabilities allow brands to monitor thousands of products across hundreds of retailers with minimal effort. As soon as there is a MAP violation, brand managers can be automatically notified to take action.

Benefits of Automated Monitoring

The benefits of automating MAP monitoring include:

• Up-to-date view of pricing compliance across channels
• Ability to identify and resolve violations quickly
• Optimized enforcement of MAP policies across retailers
• Prevent brand image damage and price erosion
• Promote consistent consumer pricing expectations
• Fair competition and protected profit margins
• Significantly reduced manual monitoring workload

For MAP policies to work, brands need comprehensive visibility into retail pricing in order to respond to violations swiftly. Automation provides the most efficient solution.

Best Practices for MAP Compliance

Based on my experience, here are some best practices brands should follow for MAP monitoring:

• Identify optimal MAP pricing levels based on category benchmarks, competition, and price elasticity. Set MAPs strategically.
• Build authorized retailer lists and identify unauthorized sellers through IP mapping across channels. Know your sellers.
• Categorize policy violations by severity based on discount levels and channel. Not all violators are equal.
• Enforce MAP with escalating actions like notifications, warnings, and blocking inventory for continued violations. Be firm and consistent.
• Automate daily tracking of pricing across channels to get alerts as violations occur. Real-time insight is key.
• Monitor mega retailers like Amazon and Walmart closely through custom strategies given their scale. Prioritize them.

Conclusion

MAP monitoring gives brands powerful control in enforcing pricing standards across retail channels. Automating the process through advanced software tools maximizes efficiency and compliance coverage. For consumer brands utilizing MAP policies, robust automated monitoring is now an operational imperative in modern omnichannel commerce.