The sheer number of choices available to shoppers every day is hard to comprehend. Retailers and shoppers alike have more data at their fingertips than ever, and purchasing cycles are becoming shorter and shorter every day. Because of this, brands today are forced to rely on data more than ever before in order to make informed decisions, monitor brand reputation, and protect their bottom line. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving these goals is the presence of data silos – where critical information is isolated across different departments, systems, or platforms. For brands aiming to maintain MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) compliance, data silos can be a significant challenge, leading to data blindness, missed violations, inconsistent enforcement, and feeling completely overwhelmed with confusion and frustration.
In this week’s post, we’ll dive into the problem presented by data silos, why they pose such a challenge to MAP compliance, and some real-world strategies brands can use today to overcome them.
What Are Data Silos?
At a high level, a data silo occurs when a company’s data is not easily shared across the organization. It’s sometimes referred to as “dark data” because it exists in separate systems, teams or stakeholders making it difficult to access or share for the greater benefit of the company. A common example of this is sales data being stored in one system, while marketing data is stored in another, and customer success metrics data in yet another. Without proper communication between these systems, sometimes called data socialization, each department may have an incomplete view of the overall business, creating inefficiencies and blind spots.
In the context of MAP compliance, data silos prevent brands from seeing the full picture of how their products are being advertised across various channels. This fragmentation can result in delayed responses to MAP violations, missed opportunities to enforce policies, and, ultimately, can significantly impact the brand financially.
How Data Silos Affect MAP Compliance
Limited Visibility or Incomplete Picture
One of the biggest challenges of successfully enforcing MAP policies is monitoring mandated prices across multiple sales channels, including direct retail partners, online distributors, and third-party marketplaces. When data is not easily shared in a single platform or view, it becomes incredibly difficult for brands to work off the same data set, often creating friction among teams and making enforcement efforts far more difficult than they have to be.
In a recent conversation with a consumer electronics brand, we learned that one team tracks prices on its direct-to-consumer website and key retail partners, but rarely gets the needed visibility into how its products are being advertised on major marketplaces because “that data sits with another team and it’s sometimes not worth the effort to get it.” This reliance on chasing down the data leads to missed violations and sparsely enforced MAP prices.
Inconsistent MAP Enforcement
Without a unified data source, MAP enforcement suffers, becoming inconsistent at best…sometimes even being abandoned altogether. When different departments hold access to different datasets, there is often a substantial delay in identifying and addressing violations with retailers. Brand teams, for example, might focus only on pricing data from key retail partners, while the sales team monitors pricing on marketplaces, and yet another team is looking only at online distributors.
Recently, a well-known sports apparel brand best described how silos affect MAP enforcement efforts. “90% of our focused MAP enforcement is on larger retailers because that’s where the bulk of our sales come from. We don’t have time to track down the mom-and-pop retailers or unauthorized sellers on niche e-commerce platforms […] and I couldn’t even tell you how many violations are out there on the small guys.”
While this may seem like a strategic focus, upon digging into the reasoning behind this it became clear it was a siloed data issue. Without consolidated data, these smaller violations may go unnoticed, leading to broader price erosion over time. This inconsistency can also damage relationships with retail partners, who may feel unfairly targeted or neglected when enforcement is unevenly applied.
Inefficient Decision-Making
When data is siloed, decision-making can suffer. Without access to all the data available, executives may be poorly informed, missing key data points, unable to make the necessary analysis, or – even worse – hastily resort to gut-level decisions. For MAP compliance, this means that compliance teams or brand managers may lack the full data set they need to make informed decisions about pricing violations and enforcement actions and could be missing the bigger picture.
One customer we spoke to recently mentioned that their Legal team “requires at least 5 MAP violations before issuing a C&D notice and requires 20 violations within a 3-month window to take punitive legal action.” When asked how many resellers they took to court last year, they stated “we probably could have taken several known offenders but didn’t have enough data points to do so…[even though] we all knew they were sneaky and not being good partners.”
With data fragmented across different systems, brands sometimes can’t prove out their theories about recurrent offenders, leading to unaddressed violations and essentially signaling to the market that their MAP policy doesn’t hold the necessary weight to be taken seriously.
The Financial Impact of Data Silos
Data silos don’t only create operational challenges but can also have a direct financial impact on a brand’s revenue. In the context of a brand’s MAP enforcement (or lack thereof), these financial consequences can be severe and include lost sales, increased compliance costs, and damaged retailer relationships, all of which we’ve touched on in previous blog posts. Several studies have shown that the average company loses 20-30% in revenue every year because of an inability to access or socialize the right data with the appropriate stakeholders and we see these impacts daily in the retail world.
Strategies for Overcoming Data Silos
So you think you have some significant data silos and want to know what to do…you’re in luck. With the right steps, you can overcome the challenges of data silos and increase the ability to make data-backed decisions for everyone in your organization. To do so, brands must first agree to adopt a more integrated, data-driven approach to MAP compliance; one that is accessible to all relevant stakeholders and one that doesn’t require detective work to track down the necessary data.
Here are some strategies and tactics to help facilitate change:
- Implement Centralized Data Systems
This isn’t a quick fix, but brands should seek to implement a centralized system that consolidates data from all relevant sources. This can be through a dedicated platform like Pervasive Mind’s MAP solution or a separate integrated data management system. Either way, brands need to operate off a unified view of pricing across all sales channels. A centralized system also ensures that all stakeholders – sales, marketing, and legal/compliance – have access to the same information. Operating out of a shared playbook starts by all viewing the same data sources.
- Automate Data Collection
Manual monitoring of MAP pricing across multiple channels is incredibly time-consuming, prone to errors, often sporadic, and (dare I say it?) a little bit foolish, but it becomes that much harder when data is siloed. By using automated tools to collect, normalize, and analyze data, brands can reduce the time spent on monitoring and focus their efforts on enforcement and corrective actions.
- It Takes a Village
It takes a village. The key to effectively managing MAP compliance is breaking down the barriers not just in data systems but also in organizational structure. Sales, marketing, brand, and legal teams all have a role to play in enforcing MAP policies, and fostering collaboration between these departments is crucial. One brand we work with that continually exemplifies how a brand should be enforcing MAP holds a bi-weekly “round table” where each department sends two liaisons to inform and re-align with their partners across the office. Encouraging regular communication between departments also helps ensure that all stakeholders are aware of emerging and ongoing trends and that best practices can take shape sooner rather than later.
- Use Data to Identify Patterns and Trends
Once data is centralized and accessible, brands can begin to analyze it for patterns and trends themselves or employ a solution like Pervasive Mind’s AI-driven MAP solution that removes much of the heavy lifting. By using the same dataset throughout the organization, tasks like identifying repeat offenders, understanding seasonal pricing behaviors, and tracking long-term price erosion all become easier, faster, and more comprehensive. Over the long term, using data analytics tools to identify trends allows brands to take a more strategic approach to MAP compliance, rather than simply reacting to individual violations.
Conclusion
If you made it this far, we commend you. Data silos are not inherently fun to talk about and would cause many to pull the ripcord before the third paragraph. But – understanding how data silos create significant challenges for brands trying to drive revenue and protect their reputation is critical. Without unified data, brands are left with limited visibility, inconsistent enforcement, and inefficient decision-making, all of which can have serious financial consequences, not to mention confusion, frustration, and – occasionally – even resentment.
By investing in centralized data platforms, automating data collection, working across teams, and using data to identify patterns, brands can overcome the headaches that accompany data silos and can take a more proactive approach to MAP compliance. In doing so, brand value is protected, retailer relationships are stronger, and revenue is safeguarded.
