Promotions and Markdown: AI to drive retail campaigns

By Chris Billingham on January 12, 2024

Continuous macro and microeconomic impacts in 2023 have made the lives of retail merchandisers and demand planners even more challenging.

The latest releases of Peak’s AI pricing applications — Promotions and Markdown — are here to take away some of the pain. These apps provide teams with the the ability to apply business-specific AI to optimize in-season percentage-off campaigns, as well as end of season stock clearance, and to always balance their product stock-clearance and margin goals.

Optimizing margin vs. stock clearance goals

Maximizing revenue through clearing of stock is a really scary game of chicken and egg. Discounting pricing too much may cannibalize other products in your portfolio, or worse, have no effect on demand at all. Discounting too little, on the other hand, means you may be left with a stock surplus after season end (and then you’re in really big trouble).

The merchandising and demand planning teams that are tasked with making these crucial margin-based decisions have to take into account a huge number of variables in order to create campaigns they can stand behind. With the latest releases of Peak’s AI applications, this whole process just became infinitely easier.

With Promotions and Markdown, you can simply build your campaigns based on your chosen products, and allow each application’s sophisticated machine learning algorithms to identify that ideal sweet spot between price change and stock out goals — with a clear forecast on revenue vs. cost for every single one of your products.

No more guessing with price elasticity

We speak to retail experts, merchandisers and demand planners every single day. Plus, a lot of the Peak team have strong knowledge and experience of retail and pricing from their previous roles. From our years of being immersed in the world of retail, we know that the challenge of choosing products for a targeted campaign is hugely complex — it involves huge, data-heavy spreadsheets and a difficulty in understanding, at a product level, if you ever actually made the right choice.

At Peak, we’re experts in both this problem and the solution, price elasticity. Price elasticity is the impact of product demand based on changing the price. Peak’s tailored, business-specific elasticity models are the foundations of our Promotions and Markdown applications. They ensure you always discount stock in a way that has a positive impact on your company’s top and bottom line, whilst enforcing your business-specific guardrails in its decision-making logic.

We’ve really been focusing on quick time to value for our retail customers. This new release combines a sleek customer journey through campaign setting to deployment, with industry-leading business user interaction with AI. It removes all of the complexity and gives merchandisers and planners the ability to apply these powerful tools in their day-to-day processes seamlessly.

Tom Chiles

Senior Product Manager, Pricing Intelligence, Peak

What’s coming next?

You can expect to see more explainability in the applications to ensure you always understand the nuanced decision that’s being made. As well as this, there’ll be options for scenario planning based on shifting campaign constraints, empowering you to make a more informed decision on your product-level pricing. And that’s just the start!

We want to hear from you!

Understanding the industries and businesses that we work with is key to the Peak team elevating our AI applications to the next level, and driving more game-changing results for our customers. We’d love you to take this short survey to help us gather data on the pricing market to help us further improve our offering. Thanks in advance!

We’re really excited about these latest developments for Promotions and Markdown, two of the many AI applications on offer from Peak. To learn more, head to our Promotions or Markdown application pages — or sign up for our next B2C pricing demo below 👇