Why Your Promotions Are Working Less and What the Data Says

If you have been running the same promotional mechanics for two or three years and getting less out of them than you used to, you are not alone. Across fresh produce and FMCG, this is one of the most common problems we see. It is also one of the most expensive, because it tends to go unnoticed until it has already been quietly draining margin for months.

The promotions still run. The discounts still appear on shelf. But the volume response is softer than it once was, the ROI has slipped, and nobody in the room can quite put their finger on why.

What Promotional Fatigue Actually Looks Like

It is worth being clear that promotional fatigue is not simply about discounting too heavily. It is a structural problem, and it tends to show up in a few distinct ways.

• Declining uplift per event. The same discount depth that used to move real volume is now generating a fraction of the response it once did.
• Pantry loading without category growth. Shoppers buy ahead when something is on deal, then buy nothing for the next few weeks. Overall volume stays flat but demand becomes harder to plan around.
• A shrinking baseline. Full-price sales gradually erode as shoppers learn to wait for the next deal. The baseline that your promotions are supposed to lift has quietly got lower.
• ROI compression. You are investing the same or more in promotional activity, but the commercial return keeps getting smaller.

The Root Causes We See Most Often

When we dig into the scan data and loyalty data together, the causes behind promotional fatigue tend to fall into three buckets.

1. Frequency without rhythm

Promotions create urgency when shoppers believe the deal will not always be there. Once your product is on promotion for more than 35 to 40 percent of volume weeks, that belief disappears. Shoppers stop acting now because they know the discount will come back. The scarcity signal is gone and with it, the behavioural response you were counting on.

2. SKU-on-SKU clashes

In categories with multiple premium products, promoting competing SKUs at the same time does not grow the category. It just moves volume between your own lines at a lower margin. You end up funding a trade without adding any new shoppers or additional spend. The retailer may be happy. Your P&L is not.

3. Depth without targeting

A blanket discount applied uniformly across all retailers, regions and shopper segments is almost always wasteful. Price-sensitive shoppers will respond to a 15 percent discount. You do not need 30 percent to win them. And genuinely premium shoppers can actually be put off by a deep price cut because it raises doubts about quality. The same mechanic does different things in different contexts, and treating them the same means leaving money on the table everywhere.

"The data showed us we were spending 40 percent more on promotions than two years ago and getting 15 percent less volume response. We had not changed anything except that the rhythm had become so predictable that shoppers just waited for it." National Sales Manager, Fresh Produce Client

How to Diagnose It in Your Own Data

If you have access to scan data through a retailer portal or a provider like Circana or NIQ, you can start this diagnostic yourself. Here is the framework we use.

1. Plot baseline against promotional volume over 24 months. If your baseline is trending down while promotional volume holds, that is the clearest sign that shoppers have been conditioned to wait for deals rather than buying at full price.
2. Calculate uplift per promotion event. Take total promotional volume, subtract the baseline for that period, then divide by the number of promoted weeks. Track this figure over time. A declining trend is your signal.
3. Map your promotional calendar against your competitors. Weeks where you and a direct competitor are both running promotions almost always suppress both parties' response. The noise cancels out.
4. Segment by retailer. Shoppers at different retail partners often respond very differently to the same mechanic. Treating all retailers identically means the approach is wrong for most of them.

Rebuilding a Promotional Rhythm That Actually Works

Fixing this is not about running fewer promotions. It is about making the promotions you do run mean something again. There are four practical changes that tend to move the needle.

Pull back frequency before pushing depth. This feels counterintuitive, but reducing how often you promote often increases the response you get per event. You are restoring the scarcity signal that made the promotion work in the first place.

Sequence your SKUs rather than running them together. If you have multiple premium lines, give each one its own moment in the promotional calendar. When they compete for the same shopper at the same time, they just cannibalise each other.

Actively defend your full-price baseline. Every non-promotional week is a chance to rebuild the baseline your next promotion will lift from. In-store visibility, sampling and POS support can all help sustain full-price sales without discounting.

Let the retailer data inform the mechanic. Where price sensitivity is high, a clean price-led promotion makes sense. Where shoppers are more premium-oriented, a value-added mechanic or quality story tends to hold margin better. Your scan data can tell you which is which if you ask the right questions of it.

What the Outcome Looks Like

When we worked through this with a fresh produce client over a single season, the results were a 15 percent increase in per-event uplift, a meaningful recovery in the baseline between promotions, and a reduction in total promotional spend. Less investment, better return. The change was not in how much they promoted. It was in how deliberately they did it.

That is what promotional discipline actually looks like in practice. Not fewer promotions, but smarter ones. Timed with more care, sequenced to avoid internal conflict, and calibrated to the shopper each retailer is actually serving.