Promotional Campaigns that Click and Ship: S&OP, the Marketing’s Secret Ally
Eric Rambeaux, & Thierry Fausten
April 29th, 2025
Successful promotional campaigns require more than just creative marketing efforts: they demand precise coordination between Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and marketing to ensure demand planning and resource alignment. By working together, these functions enhance promotional effectiveness, optimize inventory, and prevent operational disruptions.
Demand Planning for Effective Promotions
Marketing teams create campaigns based on consumer trends, competitive analysis, seasonal demand and the life cycle of products. Without S&OP's demand forecasting analysis and calibration, companies risk stock shortages or excess inventory. S&OP integrates historical sales data, real-time market trends, and promotional impact analysis to predict demand accurately. This ensures that sufficient stock is available to support campaigns without overburdening supply chains.
Resource Alignment and Operational Efficiency
Successful promotion is not just about generating demand. It is about fulfilling it efficiently. The rare examples of consumers queuing for hours (or even days) to snatch the latest gizmo can’t be expected to be replicated beyond a few niche-specific products and markets. S&OP needs to collaborate with marketing to align production schedules, supply chain logistics, and inventory distribution to match promotional timelines. By ensuring materials, manufacturing capacity, and transportation resources are in place, companies can avoid disruptions that could undermine campaign success. The multiplicity of marketing and distribution channels increase the difficulty of perfect execution.
Agility and Real-Time Adjustments
Market conditions and consumer responses to promotions can be difficult to predict. By continuously monitoring campaign performance and demand fluctuations, S&OP and marketing can make real-time adjustments. If demand exceeds projections, supply chain teams can quickly adapt production and distribution strategies. If sales fall short, marketing can recalibrate promotional efforts to maximize impact. Still, volatility of markets, consumer expectations, and overall business environment, mean that access to fresh and reliable data is a competitive advantage that companies must master.
Closing the supply chain loop
Whilst many focus on “pushing products out to the customer”, in certain sectors, recent trends and legal requirements make it an incentive, if not an obligation, to plan for the collection of old products when a new one is purchased. Hence, in times of potentially increased sales thanks to promotional efforts, the capacity and capability of the return flows must also be adjusted. Beyond sorting, repairing, recycling, repurposing, destroying and discarding, remarketing efforts will be necessary for those products that can make it back to a user, assisted by distribution execution as necessary. S&OP and marketing thus work on multiple product loops; the increase in workload and flows triggered by promotional activities needs careful planning to avoid disgruntled stakeholders.
Creativity sells. Coordination delivers
Collaboration between S&OP and marketing is critical for executing high-impact promotional campaigns. By integrating demand planning with resource alignment, companies ensure that marketing efforts translate into actual sales without operational bottlenecks. This synergy not only maximizes revenue but also enhances customer satisfaction and overall business efficiency.