In winter 2026 Grant Burge ran two promotions for the same wine, in the same season, tied to the same football finals — and they weren’t the same promotion. The Liquorland execution topped out at a $10,000 AFL prize pack.. The BWS execution then went live a few weeks later. Same brand, same wine, same finals series, two different retailers, two different prize structures built to fit them. Neither was a national campaign that happened to run through both chains. Each was built for the retailer it ran in.
That’s the part most marketing teams skip. The instinct is to design one promotion for the shopper, then take it to every retailer at once as a fait accompli. But a national mechanic pitched identically to Coles, Woolworths, BWS and Liquorland on the same day is usually the weaker pitch, not the more efficient one — because none of those category managers experience it as “built for me.” They experience it as “built for the brand’s media plan, and I happened to be in the distribution list.”
What the retailer is actually weighing up
In The Shelf Truth, we call the person making that call the Gatekeeper, and it’s worth being precise about what they’re actually assessing, because it’s rarely “is this a good idea.” A category manager’s job is to grow their category’s sales without creating operational headaches, and a promotion is one of dozens of things competing for their attention in any given trading period. Ranged, a retail consultancy that advises suppliers pitching Coles and Woolworths, is explicit that the commercial plan needs to cover RRP, promotional plan and marketing funding in the same document — not as a range-and-pricing conversation now and a promotional afterthought later. If your promotional plan only shows up after the listing terms are settled, you’ve already told the buyer it’s an afterthought for you too.
The Gatekeeper isn’t just weighing upside, either. They’re weighing what happens if it goes wrong — a receipt validation process that generates complaints, a prize draw that runs into a compliance question, a mechanic staff in-store can’t explain to a customer standing at the counter. None of that shows up in the concept deck. It shows up in the operational detail, which is exactly the part most pitches rush through to get to the creative.
What is the S.O.S. Framework?
The S.O.S. Framework pressure-tests a promotion pitch against the three things a retailer actually cares about, in the order they actually care about them: is it Simple enough for staff and shoppers to understand at a glance, is it Operationally sound enough not to create problems in-store, and does it demonstrably drive Sales rather than just look clever. Bamboo Marketing has written the fuller version of the framework and how to build a pitch deck around it; the part worth adding from the delivery side is what happens to each of those three letters once the promotion actually has to run in a store.
Simple is a design decision, but it’s tested in the store, not the deck — a mechanic that needs explaining gets misrepresented at point of sale, and a category manager who’s been burned by a confusing promotion once remembers it for a long time. Operational is the one most pitches under-cook, because “will this work across a chain of stores with casual staff on a Saturday morning” is a different question from “will shoppers like it,” and it’s usually the question your own team has spent the least time answering before the meeting. Sales is where a live promotion either proves the first two were solid or exposes that they weren’t — which is the argument for building the proof into the mechanic itself rather than promising it in advance.
Why the Grant Burge numbers aren’t a coincidence
Start with the honest part of the gap: BWS had more than five times Liquorland’s prize pool to work with, and it cost roughly $474 to fund each winner there against $284 at Liquorland — a bigger, more expensive execution by design, reflecting BWS’s own scale in that client’s national account plan. No framework changes that. But the more interesting decision is what BWS did with the extra budget, because it didn’t just make the same prize bigger — it funded five times as many winners at the small-reward tier, and a BWS entrant’s odds of winning anything ended up roughly three times better than a Liquorland entrant’s on a near-identical number of entries. That’s the Rule of Three at work: a promotion where about one in seven people walks away with something feels winnable in a way a promotion with a handful of big winners and not much else doesn’t, and a category manager who’s watched a promotion over-promise on “everyone’s a winner” messaging notices the difference between a campaign that can actually deliver that feeling and one that only claims to. The budget explains the scale. It doesn’t explain the shape — and the shape is the part a brand actually chooses.
This is also where measurement earns its place in the pitch rather than turning up afterwards. The Australian Grocery Distributors industry body puts it plainly: major supermarkets now expect suppliers to bring data-sharing tools and insights platforms to the relationship, not just a promotion, and says that pressure lands hardest on suppliers without a track record to fall back on. That’s the gap Trudy is built to close — not to make the pitch deck look more sophisticated, but because a category manager who approves a promotion wants to check on it mid-flight rather than wait six weeks for a wrap-up report, and a brand that can show real entry and redemption numbers while the promotion is live is doing some of the trust-building a longer retailer relationship would otherwise have to do on its own.
The mechanic decision and the approval decision are the same conversation
Of the promotions we’ve run, just over half use a straightforward entry mechanic rather than anything more mechanically complex — not because brands lack ambition, but because simplicity is what a category manager can say yes to quickly. A cashback or a gift-with-purchase asks more of a retailer’s systems and shelf-edge signage than a straightforward draw entry does, and that’s before you get to collect-to-win or multi-step conditionals, which read well in a strategy deck and considerably less well to a store manager briefing casual staff.
None of that means the simplest mechanic always wins — the One Job Rule still applies, and a promotion built to grow basket size needs a different mechanic to one built to drive trial. What it means is that the mechanic decision and the retailer-approval decision are the same conversation, not two separate ones. Choose the mechanic for the shopper alone, without asking whether a category manager can picture it running cleanly across their stores, and you’ve solved half the problem and left the other half to be discovered in the pitch meeting — usually the hard way.
The Grant Burge campaigns cleared two different retailers in the same season because each pitch was built around that retailer’s own shopper and store reality — budget included — not around a single national concept asking two different Gatekeepers to say yes to the same thing. Before the next pitch meeting, not during it, the question worth answering isn’t “will shoppers like this.” It’s “would this specific category manager, looking at their own stores and their own risk, actually say yes” — and if the honest answer is “only if we changed three things,” those are the three things to fix before the meeting, not after it stalls. We help brands run that check before it matters; here’s where to start if that’s useful.
