MAP Policy Strategies That Keep Working

Writing a MAP policy takes an afternoon. Enforcing it in month nine, against the dealer you least want to upset, is the part programmes lose. What follows are the operating habits that decide whether a policy is still real a year after it was announced.

Enforce the same way against your largest dealer

Selective enforcement is what turns a policy into a negotiating position. Once one dealer discovers that the notices stop at a certain order volume, the policy describes a threshold and not a floor. The dealers who complied are the ones who lost money doing it.

Decide before you start whether you are willing to cut supply to your biggest account. If the answer is no, say so internally and set the policy where you can hold it.

One price file, published by you

A violation can be nothing more than a disagreement about what the number is. Distributor sheets go stale, two distributors circulate different files for the same part, and a dealer prices off whichever landed in their inbox last.

Publish the MAP figures yourself, date them, and make that the file everyone is measured against. When a dealer says the price came straight from their supplier, you then have something to check instead of an argument to have.

Report the compliance rate, not the violation count

A count of violations found measures how hard someone looked. The number that tells you whether the programme is working is the share of listings found that are at or above policy. That means recording the compliant listings too.

Take that reading before the first notice goes out. Without a starting rate, every later claim about progress is an opinion.

Escalate in tiers, and mean the last one

Email notice, then phone and a mailed letter, then the supply route. The first tiers settle the accidents and the sellers who care about the relationship. The seller who is deliberately below policy stops when resupply stops. A Do Not Sell list your distributors will act on is the only tier that reaches them.

Platform complaints that dress a pricing violation up as an infringement claim are not part of this. That route works once and costs you standing afterwards.

Give the compliant dealers a reason

Co-op advertising funds, early access to stock, inclusion on the authorised list you publish to customers. Compliance costs a dealer margin in the short run, so something has to sit on the other side of it. A programme that only ever arrives as a complaint trains dealers to see you as a cost.

Keep the evidence and the receipts

Two records carry the whole programme. A timestamped capture of each violation with its URL, because sellers raise the price and then deny it was ever there. And a record of who received the policy and when. A policy the seller was never given is the weakest thing you can bring to an argument.

Review the figures on a set date, not when a complaint arrives, and reissue the policy when they change.

On what a run programme includes, see MAP monitoring and enforcement. On why violations come back even when all of this is in place, see the four causes.