Benefits of a Strong MAP Policy for Your Brand

A MAP policy does one thing. It sets the lowest price a reseller may advertise your product at, and it says nothing about the price that reseller may actually sell at. Every benefit below follows from that single restriction, and so does every limit.

Your dealers feel it before you do

The dealer who holds your price is the one a policy protects. Without one, the seller who posts the lowest number takes the click. The dealer who stocked the part and answers the phone about it loses the sale. That dealer eventually discounts too, or stops buying from you.

A written policy enforced the same way for everyone takes that decision away from all of them at once. Parity in advertised price is what dealers ask for, and it is what they notice is missing.

What it does for the brand, stated honestly

A shopper comparing eight listings for the same part sees one number instead of a spread. What that is worth to your brand depends on your category and your margin structure. Anyone who quotes you a percentage for it is guessing.

The measurable part is narrower. You can count how many listings sit at or above policy, watch that figure move, and act on the ones that do not. That number is the benefit. The rest of what gets claimed for MAP is downstream of it.

The compliant sellers are an asset

Attention in a MAP programme goes to violators. The sellers who comply are the ones you can name, contact and keep supplying. Acknowledge them and keep a current list of who they are. A programme that treats every seller as an adversary loses the good ones to a brand that does not.

Four things a MAP policy will not fix

Knowing these in advance saves an argument later.

• It does not set what a customer pays. A reseller can still sell below the advertised floor. That distinction between advertising and resale price is the part your counsel will care about, and we are not lawyers. 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.
• It does nothing about a marketplace selling as a first-party retailer. When the marketplace owns the inventory it sets its own retail price. There is no reseller to write to. That is a sourcing question.
• It does not reach a seller who never bought from you. A notice to an unauthorised seller carries no supply consequence. The answer there is identifying the distributor who supplied them.
• It is worth nothing undistributed. A policy the seller never received is the weakest thing you can bring to any argument about it.

Measure the starting point before you count any benefit

Run monitoring and record the compliance rate before the first notice goes out. Without a starting figure there is no way to tell a working programme from a quiet quarter. Every later claim about progress becomes an opinion.

If you want the monitoring and the enforcement sequence run for you, that is what our MAP monitoring and enforcement service does.