Worksheet · B2C: Consumer Pricing Health Check
Measure your five biggest promotions properly
Comparing promotion weeks with the weeks before counts the sales and forgets the margin given away. This sheet works out what each of your five biggest promotions had to deliver, then measures what it did against a baseline. It builds the Competent step of the check:
Incremental sales and margin are estimated against a baseline for major events, and clear losers are killed.
Step 1. What each promotion had to deliver
Work this out before you look at the results. With a margin m and a discount d, units must rise by d ÷ (m − d) just to earn the same margin dollars. At a 40% margin, a 20% discount needs twice the units.
| Promotion | Margin at full price (%) | Discount (%) | Unit uplift needed to break even (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| e.g. Spring sale | 40% | 20% | 100% |
Step 2. What it delivered
- Baseline: units in the same weeks without a promotion (last year, or matched stores).
- Cannibalisation: sales lost from other products the customer would have bought.
- Pull-forward: the dip in the weeks after, when customers had already stocked up.
- Funding: anything a supplier paid toward it.
| Promotion | Baseline units | Promotion units | Uplift (%) | Cannibalised margin ($) | Pull-forward dip ($) | Supplier funding ($) | Incremental margin ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Step 3. Decide
| Promotion | Uplift needed | Uplift achieved | Incremental margin ($) | Repeat, change or kill |
|---|---|---|---|---|
A promotion that lost margin twice running comes off the calendar.
Done when: your five biggest promotions have incremental sales and margin estimated against a baseline, and any clear loser is off next year's calendar.
Adapted from our own elasticity study (Deloitte, 2015).
From the B2C: Consumer Pricing Health Check. Your report links the sheet for each of its moves.