Trade Promotion – TPM – TPO – Synectics Group Company Overview


The following definition is in the Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary:

Synectics Group: a group of people of varied background that meets to attempt creative solutions of problems through the unrestricted exercise of imagination and the correlation of disparate elements.

years ago we chose Synectics Group for our company name because this textbook definition describes who we are and what we do:

Only a group with varied backgrounds can design a best-of-breed trade promotion system. Trade promotion has a direct impact on almost every department within a CPG company's organization: field sales, sales management, marketing, marketing research, information technology, finance, customer service, production, and others.

Trade promotion is not as simple as some vendors might lead you to believe. Conflicting and competing goals and interests are inherent to trade promotion management because so many different departments are affected by trade promotions. We use creative solutions, imagination and our passion to help CPG manufacturers improve the way they manage trade promotions.

True closed-loop trade promotion management requires the correlation and integration of shipments, cost of goods, syndicated data, and many of other disparate data elements.

Why the name Account Review™?

We chose the name Account Review™ back in 1985, long before the terms CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) were coined. In 1985, very few CPG manufacturers were doing any trade promotion analysis. Of the few that were trying, most used market level data from only one source, such as SAMI or shipment data.

In 1985 we were doing trade promotion analysis with shipment data, internal financial data, and scanner data from the newly public company, Information Resources Inc. (IRI) We chose the name Account Review™, because it reflected our vision for trade promotion management:

We chose the word Account because our software drove analysis and decision making right down to the customer. This philosophy of getting closer to the customer is an important part of CRM.

We chose the word Review because we brought together all data sources into one database for better focus on the customer. This is another key concept for CRM. Better customer results can be accomplished when all data relevant to a customer is accessible by the people interacting with the key account.

We put the words Account and Review together, because back in 1985 it was very difficult and time consuming to prepare business reviews for customers. Our software focused on reducing and automating trade promotion management tasks, but it also could help prepare business reviews. We decided to use a play-on-words and called our software Account Review™. Years later these attributes of helping simplify and computerize the TPM activities of the CPG field sales would be identified as SFA.

Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary is a registered trademark of it's respective owners.

What is a Synectics Group?