Working with retailers

Our trade marketing and distribution employees globally work with retailers and develop mutually beneficial partnerships.

We’re always working to ensure we are the partner of choice to the trade wherever we do business. We work to operate in the most efficient and effective way so retailers can offer the products our consumers want to buy, where they want them, when they want them, at the right quality, price and quantity.

It is the nature of our industry that we do business with a substantial cross section of customers, ranging from the largest retail corporations to small independent shop owners.

As well as many hundreds of regional and local customers, we work with key customers at a global level. Their very large businesses are mainly in the grocery, convenience and petrol station convenience channels.

Our approach

Our approach is based on building mutually beneficial relationships, characterised by integrity, with our trade partners globally, regionally and locally.

Our aim is not just to focus on our own goals, but to engage with senior management of partner companies for a good mutual understanding of each other’s global strategies and to identify potential areas of alignment and cooperation. We also aim to offer our trade partners a comprehensive insight into consumer preferences and buying behaviour in the tobacco category.

We recognise that for a successful relationship and mutual benefit, there has to be a win for the three key stakeholders: our consumers, our customers and our business.

Customer Voice survey  

We measure our retail customers’ satisfaction through our Customer Voice survey. It has been designed and developed to provide in-depth understanding of our retail customers, particularly in terms of uncovering customers’ attitudes, perceptions and ultimately the factors which drive opinions about the BAT experience.

By conducting an ongoing dialogue with customers in the markets surveyed, we better understand their issues and concerns in the changing retail environment for mutual business benefit.

Specifically, it:

•  Assesses the satisfaction and relevancy of service provided by BAT;
•  Creates a channel for retail customers in the markets surveyed to provide feedback and for BAT to act upon;
•  Encourages and drives our companies’ action planning with multi-functional collaboration; and
•  Identifies any opportunity and areas of lower performance, which can be followed up with targeted actions, further monitoring and communication with retailers in any relevant market.
   

We are reactivating our business-to-business customer satisfaction survey following difficulties in achieving substantial coverage of markets over 2020/21, largely due to limitations in customer engagement as a result of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This reactivated survey will be rolled-out during 2022.

Adding value to trade relationships

We also aim to offer wider benefits through our relationships with distributors and retailers.

Euromonitor International estimates that approximately 400 billion cigarettes per year are smuggled, manufactured illegally or counterfeited, harming the business of legitimate distributors and retailers. Our strong focus on tackling contraband and counterfeit aims to ensure that our business supports only the legitimate tobacco trade.

Our companies must have effective ‘know your customer’ controls and will cease to supply customers who are knowingly or recklessly involved in black market activities. We help to identify traffickers of our brands through intelligence gathering and investigation and have an authentication device on our products so that counterfeits can be identified for enforcement agencies to confiscate them.

Our companies work with retailers around the world in underage access prevention programmes, to help retailers uphold the law and block underage access to our products at the point of sale.