As you outlined, Procter and Gamble have a myriad of discount and allowance strategies that keep distributors stocking their shelves with Procter and Gamble products rather than their competitors' products. I think the greatest marketing tool that Procter and Gamble have would be the trade discounts and promotional allowances. Procter and Gamble is a large corporation with a multitude of huge brands under their operational umbrella so giving promotional allowances to incentivizes distributors to advertise on their behalf is integral to the cost effectiveness of their business. The promotional allowances encourage distributors to do the heavy advertising and saves P&G from having to incur the advertising costs across all of the different product lines and brands it owns. When P&G has to advertise directly to customers then it has to advertise on behalf of every brand, while it gets to centralize the marketing for all of its products with promotional allowances without incurring additional expense. Trade discounts are an extension of this idea and are more than tolerable from an expense standpoint as they directly save each brand owned by P&G substantial amounts of marketing costs. The only possible downside to this strategy of providing extensive promotional allowances and trade discounts would be the fact that P&G has little direct control over how exactly their products are being advertised to individual consumers. P&G have been in fact moving away from promotional allowances and trade discounts recently as they find that distributors inefficiently use promotional dollars. P&G have also been moving away from these strategies as they find ways to centralize their marketing expenses such as advertising all brands, they own in a single commercial like they did in their 2021 Super Bowl commercial. Overall, it will be interesting to see if P&G and other advertising giants find more cost effective ways to market outside of promotional allowances. 

 

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