Building a MAP programme in the right order

Do these in order. Write the policy. Distribute it so you can prove who received it. Measure where you are starting from. Then enforce. Each step depends on the one before it. Skipping one produces a specific failure that turns up later, usually as an argument you cannot win.

Write it before you monitor anything

Enforcement quotes the policy. Say the document does not name which products are covered, where the current figure lives, or what counts as advertising. A notice then has nothing to quote, and the reply writes itself. The reseller did not know.

Distribute it so receipt is provable

Send it in a way that leaves a record, and keep the record. When a dealer says the policy never reached them, that record is the whole argument. Reissue it whenever the figures change and date the version, so there is no question about which one was in force when the listing appeared.

Measure before you enforce

Run monitoring across your whole SKU list and record the compliance rate before the first notice goes out. Without a starting number, nothing you claim about the programme afterwards can be checked, by you or by anyone above you. A sample will not do it, because a sample measures the sample.

Enforce in a fixed order

Notice, then repeat contact, then supply. Write the order down, apply it the same way to every seller, and hold the timing steady. The tier that ends a habitual violator is the supply one. The earlier tiers resolve the sellers who were careless, and they move the deliberate ones somewhere else.

Keep the evidence. A screenshot carrying the URL and the timestamp ends the conversation where a seller changes the price and then says it was never there.

Report the rate, and who is complying

Report the compliance rate against every listing found, including the compliant ones. Then what changed since the last report, and which sellers could not be identified at all. A report listing violations found tells you how hard somebody looked.

Keep a current list of the sellers who comply, with contact details. They are the half of the channel the programme is protecting.

Review the figures on a date, not on a complaint

Set the date, review the MAP figures on it, and reissue. Changing a figure because a large dealer complained teaches every other dealer how figures get changed.