MAP Policy: The Ultimate Guide for Brand Commerce Pros

Four things tell you a MAP policy is overdue. Advertised prices for your parts drift down month after month. Your authorised dealers start asking why they are being undercut. Listings appear from sellers you cannot name. And your own promotions stop moving volume, because the everyday price online is already lower than the one you were about to announce.

Any one of those is worth a look. Two together means the channel has already decided your pricing for you.

What each sign is actually telling you

Drifting advertised prices mean somebody is buying market share with your margin, and the sellers holding price are watching it happen.

Dealers complaining means the problem has already cost you goodwill with the partners who do the expensive work of stocking and explaining your parts.

Sellers you cannot name means product is reaching the market through a route you do not control. That is a distribution question before it is a pricing one, and notices will not answer it.

Promotions falling flat means your published discount is no longer a discount. That one is the most expensive and the last to be noticed.

Stage one: write it, get it reviewed, distribute it

The document states an exact figure per part number and defines what counts as advertising. It sets out what happens after a violation, and in what order. It reads as a one-way statement from you, with no signature block and no wording where a seller agrees to anything.

Get counsel to review both the document and the way you set the numbers. We are not lawyers. The distinction between a unilateral policy and an agreement is what the United States case law turns on. That goes back to 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.

Then send it to every authorised seller and record when it went and to whom. Enforcement against a seller you cannot show received the policy is the weak version of the conversation.

Stage two: monitor before you enforce anything

Run monitoring across your full part number list and record the compliance rate before the first notice goes out. That figure is the only thing that will later tell you whether the programme worked.

Use the same period to find out what you are dealing with. How many violating listings there are, how many distinct sellers sit behind them, and how many of those you actually supply. That last count decides how much of your effort goes into notices and how much goes into finding supply routes.

Stage three: enforce in tiers

First notice in the language of your own policy, quoting the clause and the part number. Repeat contact by phone and a mailed letter where email is ignored. Then the supply route, through a Do Not Sell list your distributors can act on. Cutting resupply is the step that ends a habitual violator. The earlier tiers tend to move the violation to a new storefront.

Apply the same sequence to your largest account as to your smallest. The exception is what destroys a policy.

Stage four: widen it

More product lines, more regions, more marketplaces. Each new region needs its own legal check. What is settled in one jurisdiction is not settled everywhere. A policy written for one market can be the wrong document in another.

Widen only once the first line is holding. A programme stretched across the catalogue before the sequence works anywhere produces a lot of notices and very little change.

The thing that stalls programmes is your own sales team

Your sales people hear about violations first, and they are the ones a dealer asks for an exception. Tell them what the policy says, and that the escalation is not theirs to waive. Give them the name of the person who decides disputes.

A policy that any account manager can suspend to save a relationship is a policy that exists on paper. That is the failure worth designing against before you start, and it is the one no monitoring tool will catch.

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