MAP Implementation: The Order to Roll a Programme Out In

The order you launch a MAP programme in decides whether it survives its first real argument. Run it backwards and the notices go out before the policy has reached everyone. The first compliance number is a guess. The first serious dispute is with the account you cannot afford to lose.

The sequence below fixes that. Each step exists because the one after it is unusable without it.

1. Decide what you will do to your largest account

Answer this before anything is written. If your biggest dealer advertises below policy for six weeks and ignores two notices, will you stop supplying them?

If the answer is no, that is a legitimate commercial decision, and it means the policy has to be set where you can hold it. What you cannot do is launch a programme whose final tier you will not use. The dealers work that out, and the ones who complied are the ones who paid for it.

2. Write the policy, then have counsel read it

The document defines the advertised price, the covered parts, the channels and the consequences, with a version and a date. Counsel decides the shape it takes.

There are two points they will start from. MAP governs the advertised price, which keeps it distinct from resale price maintenance. In the US, a manufacturer’s unilateral choice 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 has been judged under the rule of reason following 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.

3. Build the catalogue and the part number cross-reference

Enforcement runs on matching. Your part number, the distributor numbers for the same item, and whatever numbering the marketplaces have accumulated around it.

Skip this and your monitoring reports only the listings that happened to use your own numbering, which is a tidy report and a false one. A seller listing under a wholesale number is invisible to it.

4. Distribute the policy and record delivery

Send it to every authorised seller, and keep the record of who received what and when. Get your distributors to hand it over when they open an account. A policy the seller never received is the weakest thing you can bring to an argument. It is the first thing a seller who wants to stall will raise.

5. Monitor before enforcing anything

Run monitoring across the full catalogue for a period with no notices going out, and measure the compliance rate. Vary the check times, including weekends, because a seller who discounts on Friday evening is compliant in every weekday crawl.

This is the step that gets skipped and cannot be recovered later. Without a starting number, every later claim about the programme working is an opinion, and you will be making that claim to a finance director.

6. Start the notices at the first tier

Email, from templates you approved, in the language of your own policy, with the listing, the capture and the correct figure. No generic threat text. Early violations include broken feeds and stale price files, and those get fixed the same day by someone who is glad you spotted it.

Escalate the ones that do not resolve: repeat contact, then a mailed letter, then supply.

7. Put the Do Not Sell list where it works

The supply tier only exists if your distributors will act on it. That means a current list, delivered to them in a usable form, and an agreement that says what they do with it. Cutting resupply is the step that ends a habitual violator. Everything before it moves the discount to a storefront you have not found yet.

8. Report the compliance rate, and the sellers you could not identify

Report the share of listings at or above policy, against the baseline from step five. Then the storefronts you could not trace, and the ones that ignored you. A report made only of violations found tells the reader how hard you looked.

For what running this looks like as a service, see MAP monitoring and enforcement. For keeping it alive after launch, see the habits that hold a programme together.