Establishing a MAP Policy in Four Steps

A MAP policy is usable when it names the products and the figures, and says what counts as advertising. It also has to state what happens on a violation, and your own counsel should read it before it leaves the building. Four steps, in that order, and the order matters because each one narrows what the next can say.

1. Name the products and the figures

Every SKU you sell, each with its MAP figure, in a document carrying a version and a date. Point at a price list if the catalogue is large, and date that too. A product missing from the list cannot be enforced on. Gaps are how a seller argues the policy was never meant to cover what they did.

2. Say which surfaces count as advertising

Name them. Marketplace listings, your resellers’ own sites, comparison sites, paid ads, email campaigns, printed flyers, in-store signage. Then say how you treat the discount that never appears as a price: coupon codes, bundles, buy-one-get-one, and prices revealed only in the cart. Sellers work in the space a policy leaves undefined, and the cart is the space most policies leave open.

3. State the consequence and who applies it

Write down what happens at each step, from first notice through to supply stopping. Name the role inside your company that runs it. A consequence nobody owns is a consequence that gets skipped for your biggest account, and one visible exception cancels the policy for everybody else.

4. Have counsel read it before it goes out

This is the step worth paying for. A MAP policy in the United States is normally drafted as a unilateral policy you issue, not an agreement you and the reseller sign. The distinction is old ground. A manufacturer’s own decision about whom it will keep supplying was treated differently from an agreement on price in one 1919 case. That case is United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). Resale price maintenance 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. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Your counsel decides what your policy may say.

Then it has to reach every reseller in writing, on a date you record, and be reissued whenever it changes. A policy the seller never received is the weakest thing you can bring to an argument. Enforcement starts from there.