During the holiday shopping season, marketing messages and discounts fly like snow. How can consumer brands cut through the chaos to deliver consistent messages and consistent prices across all retail channels?

Shoppers expect a consistent experience. Smart consumer brands find ways to deliver that consistency. Especially during the holiday season, it’s important that all retail channels provide the same visible and coherent message—and predictable, uniform pricing. Consistency of message and price across channels enhances the brand experience and ultimately generates more revenue.

But today, consistency can feel like an impossible dream. It’s hard to ensure a consistent message when shoppers might encounter your products anywhere and at any time—in your store while comparing competing products on a smartphone, in an email that pops up at work, on a tablet shopping app in front of the TV. It’s even more difficult to make sure customers encounter uniform, predictable pricing when a crowd of online retailers is trying to price your products on its own terms.

At Digital River, we help tens of thousands of merchants manage the challenges of message and price consistency. This holiday season, I’d like to offer a few ideas about how to win more sales by saying the same thing, and offering the same prices, everywhere your products sell.

Consistent Messages

How can consumer brands convey consistent messages across multiple channels, from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce sites to third-party vendors, both in-store and online?

You know the answer: multichannel brands need multichannel messaging. Reaching your prospective consumer with the right message at the right time might require multiple touch points across a variety of online and offline media. That’s why extending your reach across multiple channels increases your brand affiliation and conversions—it’s how you make sure consumers hear a consistent message about your brand.

But how intelligently can you adjust your multichannel marketing to maximize its effectiveness? Since purchasing media can be an expensive endeavor, leverage the science of attribution to find out where your message has the greatest impact. The ability to determine where your greatest ROI is coming from will help you decide where to invest. With the remainder of this holiday selling season, identify the channels that reach consumers most effectively and put your message there. If email is converting particularly well, for example, we would suggest further emphasis in that medium—even if you didn’t plan to do so in advance. The holiday season is full of surprises, and effective marking needs to be nimble.

Just as important: take control of your message at the source—your own web site. In some product categories, more than 80% of the consumers who buy a product will visit the manufacturer’s web site before making a final purchase. That’s because consumers value the comprehensive information, clear value message, and rich brand experience that only the manufacturer can provide. The more compelling you can make your own web site, the more likely shoppers will be to visit and hear your messages exactly the way you want them to be heard. And the clearer and stronger you make your own messaging, the more likely your channel partners will be to follow your lead and tell the brand stories you want consumers to hear. Message consistency begins at home.

Consistent Prices

How can consumer brands ensure price consistency across all channels—especially during the holidays, when multiple discounts and deals are being applied across multiple channels?

It takes a disciplined and consistent effort for consumer brands to maintain consistent prices. For many years, consumer brands have been enacting MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) or UPP (Unilateral Pricing Policies)—with varying levels of success. It’s an endless effort, since sellers are constantly challenging manufacturers’ willingness to enforce their own pricing policies. But with a uniform policy across all channels, and consequences for not following those policies, consumer brands can protect their brand image and provide consistent, reliable pricing for consumers. Consequences are crucial.

The same goes for larger third-party vendors and marketplaces. The third-party marketplace phenomenon is probably the biggest challenge manufacturers contend with in reducing price erosion. Amazon, eBay, Tmall, and other marketplaces create a conduit for independent sellers to challenge the market price of your product. Just as with traditional retail partners, consequences matter. If an online seller does not support your pricing requirements, hold them accountable. If they can no longer have access to selling your product, or won’t be able to take advantage of next quarter’s special offering due to their previous violation, even online marketplaces can be persuaded to help curtail the challenge of price erosion. Price consistency is worth fighting for.

Direct to consumer for the win

If you value your own brand, consistent messages and uniform pricing are vital. This article has laid out some practical things you can do to work toward consistency across retail channels. But the most important suggestion is simple: sell your own products yourself. Some recent research concludes that a direct-to-consumer sales channel will outperform all other channels within the next few years. We’ve found that, perhaps surprisingly, a direct-to-consumer sales channel can actually strengthen a manufacturer’s multichannel strategy by increasing customer engagement. In addition, a direct-to-consumer sales channel is the single best way for a consumer brand to communicate a strong, consistent message and establish clear, value-driven pricing.

This holiday season, work hard to communicate the same messages, and to offer the same prices, across your retail channels. And if you haven’t already, start laying the groundwork for selling your products through the most important, most consistent channel of all—your own.

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