Festive Season: What Are the Challenges for FMCG Brands and Retailers?

The festive season is a decisive window for FMCG brands and retailers, and a harder one than it used to be. Economic pressure has made shoppers more watchful in store, particularly at a point in the year when overspending is easy.

That raises the bar on execution. Stock, merchandising, promotions — each has to work, and each fails differently under seasonal volume. Here are the four challenges that decide how the period goes.

Promotions Have to Be Executed, Not Just Negotiated

Faced with higher prices and a fixed budget, shoppers go looking for promotions. Which makes the execution of those promotions the difference between a good season and a wasted one. Is the mechanic actually displayed in store? Is the promoted product still on shelf, and is it positioned where shoppers will meet it?

Roamler has monitored in-store promotions across Europe for over a decade, and execution scores are consistently lower than head office expects — in the weakest cases, below 40%. That gap is the argument for checking rather than assuming: a promotion that was agreed centrally and never went up correctly is budget already spent with nothing to show for it.

A small proportion of the promotional budget reallocated to monitoring lets you mobilise our community to check execution across your network while the promotion is still live — early enough to fix what is wrong rather than discover it in the post-campaign review.

Out-of-Stock Risk Rises Sharply

Detecting and correcting out-of-stocks is difficult in any month. In December it is harder still: stores are busy, replenishment cycles compress, and the shortages stop following the patterns you can normally anticipate. Promotional lines are the most exposed of all, with out-of-stock rates typically running well above baseline.

Community-based monitoring helps here because it catches products approaching stock-out rather than only recording the gap after it appears — which is the difference between a corrective action and a post-mortem. Out-of-stocks cost the sale in front of you, and some of the customer's willingness to look for your product next time.

Seasonal Merchandising Is Where Brands Separate

Through the festive period brands compete on creativity, putting field teams to work building the displays that will catch a shopper's eye. Chocolate is the category where this peaks: every year the centre aisle fills with large-format Christmas displays, combining seasonal theming, scale, and the most valuable position in the store.

Installing and maintaining those displays is a substantial workload, arriving in the busiest weeks of the year. Were the displays negotiated in advance actually built? Are they still stocked three days later? The volume of simultaneous in-store operations puts real pressure on store teams, which is exactly why seasonal merchandising needs checking rather than assuming.

Our Sales & Merch solution supports field teams with an on-demand community that can install promotional material, replenish displays, and set price tags.

And Then There Is Online

In a Roamler consumer study, 70% of respondents said they buy Christmas presents online, and a comparable share said they would not complete an online purchase without reading customer reviews first.

That makes review coverage a seasonal asset rather than a background metric. A product carrying enough recent reviews going into December is both more credible and more findable than the same product with an empty review tab.

Our Ratings & Reviews solution collects authentic customer reviews directly on e-commerce platforms, at the volume and pace the season requires.

What Our Clients Say

Every year, for each Christmas season, we use Roamler to collect health stamps and prices on private labels for smoked salmon, foie gras and all duck meat. The results helped us to understand the evolution of the offer, assortments and prices.

Marie SantucciPrivate Label Product Manager, Labeyrie