MAP and MSRP are not the same thing

MAP governs what a seller may advertise. MSRP is a suggestion about what they should sell for. That single difference decides whether your policy is enforceable. A document that confuses the two describes something you cannot act on.

What each one actually controls

MAP is the minimum advertised price. It applies to the number a seller puts in public: a product page, a listing, an email, a printed flyer. It says nothing about the price a customer eventually pays. A seller can honour your MAP in the listing and still discount in the cart, and many do.

You will also see UMAP, IMAP and EMAP. Unilateral, internet and electronic minimum advertised price. They are variations on scope, not different mechanisms. The word that matters in all of them is advertised.

MSRP is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Suggested is doing the work in that phrase. It is a reference point for the customer and a planning figure for the channel. It is not a floor, and treating it as one is where brands walk into trouble.

Why the distinction is a legal one

A policy about advertised prices and a policy about selling prices are different instruments under US antitrust law, and they are judged differently.

Setting a condition on how your product is advertised, and deciding for yourself whom you keep supplying, sits closer to a unilateral decision. A manufacturer’s unilateral choice about whom it continues to deal with has been treated differently from an agreement on price. That treatment dates from United States v. Colgate & Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). That reading is narrow. It stops applying as soon as the conduct starts to look like an agreement.

Telling a reseller what they may sell for is minimum resale price maintenance. Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, 551 U.S. 877 (2007) moved minimum resale price maintenance from automatic illegality to a case-by-case federal standard. Several US states are stricter than federal law, so where you and your resellers operate matters.

We are not lawyers and none of this is advice. The practical point is that the two documents are not interchangeable. A policy that drifts between them while you are enforcing it is worth paying a real antitrust lawyer to read.

Where this goes wrong in practice

Three failures show up repeatedly.

A policy that says MSRP where it means MAP. The document reads as though it sets the selling price, which is not what the brand wanted and not what it can comfortably enforce.

A policy that sets MAP equal to MSRP. Legal enough, but it removes every lever a seller has to compete on price. Sellers usually respond by dropping the product instead of complying.

A policy with no stated consequence. If nothing follows a violation, the policy is a preference. The consequence does not have to be dramatic. It has to be written down before you need it.

What to check in your own document

Read it and answer four questions.

Does it say advertised everywhere it means advertised? Does it state what happens on a first violation, and who decides? Does it apply to the marketplace listings where your product actually gets advertised, or only to your direct accounts? And is the floor a number a seller can still build a business on?

If the answers are unclear to you, they will be unclear to a distributor deciding whether to argue with you.

Our MAP monitoring service covers finding the violations and running the escalation. This post is about the document underneath it, which is the part a monitoring tool cannot fix.