4 Steps to Establish a Successful MAP Policy

A MAP policy that survives its first argument states four things:

• the advertised price floor for every SKU
• what counts as advertising
• what happens when a seller goes below the floor
• that you set the policy yourself

A document missing any of those gets negotiated with instead of followed.

Here is what goes into each part.

Put a number against every SKU

“Advertise responsibly” is not a policy. The document needs the floor price per part number and the date that figure takes effect. And a way for a dealer to look up the current one without calling you.

A dispute about a violation usually turns into a dispute about which price file was live that day. The effective date matters as much as the number.

Say what counts as an advertised price

The listed number is one form of advertising. So is a stacked coupon, and a bundle that buries the discount on the other item. So is a store wide percentage banner, and a product page that hides the price until the item is in the cart.

If the policy does not name those, each one becomes its own argument later. Write down which your policy treats as advertising and which it does not.

State the consequence and the order it arrives in

A policy with no stated consequence is a request. Write the sequence: what a first notice looks like, what happens when it is ignored, and the point at which supply stops. A consequence you are not willing to carry out is worse than one you never wrote down.

Write it around your own distribution

The part of a MAP policy that does the work is the part that matches how your parts reach the market. How many distributors sit between you and the dealer. Whether the marketplace sellers undercutting you buy through that chain at all. How your part numbers get rewritten in somebody else’s catalogue.

A borrowed policy gets those wrong, and the gaps are where the violations live.

Have a lawyer read it before it goes out

We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. Two points are worth raising with counsel before the policy is issued.

A MAP policy governs the advertised price, and leaves the reseller free to set the price it actually sells at. That is what keeps it separate from resale price maintenance. In the US, a manufacturer’s unilateral decision about whom it keeps supplying has been treated differently from an agreement on price. That treatment dates from United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). Resale price maintenance itself has been judged under the rule of reason since Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, 551 U.S. 877 (2007). Several states are stricter than federal law.

Your counsel writes the policy. We enforce it as written.