The cheapest growth you have is the trade money you are already wasting

When growth gets hard, the reflex is to ask for more. More budget, more headcount, more promotion. It feels like the honest answer, because doing more is visible and doing better is not.

But before you ask for more trade budget, it is worth looking hard at what the current budget is actually buying. In most consumer businesses I have worked with, a real share of trade spend is doing nothing. It is not driving incremental volume. It is not building the brand. It is funding things that would have happened anyway, or worse, training your shoppers to wait for the next deal. And the thing about that wasted spend is that moving it costs you nothing. It is growth you have already paid for and are not collecting.

Why so much of it leaks

Trade spend leaks for a simple reason. It is easy to start and hard to stop.

A promotion gets added to the calendar to hit a number, and then it stays, because removing it feels like a risk and nobody wants to be the person who killed the volume. Year after year the calendar gets heavier, never lighter. Deals get deeper to match competitors, then deeper again, and the baseline quietly resets so that the discounted price becomes the price people expect. You end up spending more to sell the same thing, and calling it support.

The other reason is that most businesses measure trade spend by how much they spent, not by what it returned. Uplift during a promotion looks impressive on a chart. But uplift is not the same as incremental. A lot of what looks like a promotion working is just shoppers who were going to buy anyway, buying on deal, plus a chunk of pull forward that you pay for again next month. Once you separate the genuinely incremental from the rest, the picture changes, and usually not in a comfortable way.

How to find the waste

You do not need a new system to start. You need to ask better questions of what you already have.

Go through the promotional calendar line by line and put each activity into one of three buckets. The ones that clearly pay back and you would protect. The ones that clearly do not and you would stop tomorrow if it were not for inertia. And the ones you genuinely cannot tell, which is usually the biggest bucket and the most revealing, because not knowing is itself the problem.

Then look at the deep, frequent deals on your biggest lines. Those are where the money is, and they are where habit hides best. If a product is on promotion more often than not, the deal is not a promotion anymore. It is the price, and you are simply losing margin on every unit while pretending otherwise.

What to do with what you find

The work is not to slash spend. Cutting trade spend bluntly just hands the shelf to someone else. The work is to move it.

You take the money off the activity that does nothing and redirect it to the activity that genuinely returns. Fewer, better promotions instead of a wall of shallow ones. Support behind the accounts and the lines where it actually compounds. Clear guardrails so the calendar cannot quietly creep back to where it was the moment attention moves elsewhere.

The result is the same budget working harder. The last time I did this properly, reallocating spend toward higher return activity moved blended promotional ROI from around 1.2 times to 1.4 times, without asking for a cent more. That is real growth, and it came entirely from money the business was already spending.

The point

More budget is the expensive answer, and often the lazy one. The trade money you are already wasting is sitting right there, fully funded, waiting to be put to better use. Start there. It is the cheapest growth you will find all year.