BORDEN STRESSES TRADE MARKETING

JAMES TENSER

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Many companies stumble trying to take the giant step from trade spending management to a true trade marketing function.

To manage through this transition successfully, brand marketers must accord "big project status" to the activity and put a high importance on skill training, said Ric Ellis, vice president of trade marketing for Borden, Columbus, Ohio. "This is not a one-person decision," Ellis said. "It takes money, time, resources -- you need a commitment against it. The organization has to say it is willing to invest in the people, in all the soft things that make it happen."

Ellis spoke here at a trade marketing conference sponsored by The Marketing Institute, New York.

"We are struggling with questions like, 'How can you measure consumer promotions?' and 'How do you allocate an FSI to a customer?' These are hard to deal with, but we'll get better at it," Ellis said.

At Borden, managers learned that responsibility for new activities such as post-promotion analyses needs to be clearly defined. "We have an internal trade marketing group and field trade marketing groups located in business centers," he explained.

"The internal group does the macro-basis, umbrella analyses. Our field people would look at things by account or geography."

Ellis said that Borden's brokers are now all on-line with Information Resources Inc. census data, with Borden footing the bill for on-line time and licenses.