Page 100 - Lighting Magazine June 2018

“Fortunately, as a business owner, you can choose how and with whom you conduct business, so we choose to only deal with manufacturers that have strong IMAP policies and who also proactively enforce those policies.”
— Bryan Johnson, Shades of Light
Retail Strategy
98 enLIGHTenment Magazine | June 2018
www.enlightenmentmag.com
having established IMAP pricing policies.
“While we know it’s a problem in the industry, we’ve seen in recent years that many manufactur- ers have announced their IMAP policies, which has helped quite a bit,” Johnson says. “Fortunately, as a business owner, you can choose how and with whom you conduct business, so we choose to only deal with manufacturers that have strong IMAP policies and who also proactively enforce those policies. We are also able to mitigate this by focusing on our own unique designs developed internally — which now accounts for a significant
portion of our business.”
The MaP connundruM
Once showrooms have de ned their goals for an online presence, identi ed the messaging they wish to convey and how it should be structured to complement their physical location, and then implemented the right technology and support team to make that a reality, there is just one nal hurdle — a level playing eld on the advertised price of products.
It’s not a secret that manufacturers have tradi- tionally provided pricing incentives to high-volume customers. However, for the manufacturers and their supply chains to be successful, they need to be pro table. That means retailers and etailers
need to stay within the parameters of the minimum advertised price (MAP) for their products. Manu- facturers recognize it’s a serious issue when any of their accounts is advertising below MAP because it can wreak havoc on the supply chain.
In an e ort to combat this, many vendors have retained the services of technology platforms like mySamm, an enterprise-level internet account management solution founded by Justin Rychak. The rst version rolled out about seven years ago, with lighting as its initial target market. Today, mySamm represents just over 100 brands. In a nutshell, mySamm helps manufacturers e ectively manage and grow their ecommerce channel by providing business intelligence, identifying their strong-performing accounts and e ectively enforc- ing MAP policies.
The mySamm system regularly scans about 30+ million URLs to monitor advertised prices of mySamm customers’ products. Whenever it detects that an etailer is in violation of the manufacturer’s parameters, the system generates a date-stamped screen shot and sends an email noti cation to the manufacturer, who can then in turn reach out to the etailer.
Rychak’s background as a strategy consultant, banker, and statistician proved to be an ideal for- mula in developing mySamm. Rychak had always