Card Policy Template [FULL INSTRUCTIONS] - Brand Alignment (2023)

These are the 3 main reasons:

You can skip important guidelines and clauses applicable to your business.

Minimum Advertised Price Policies are usually short as documents, only a few pages long. On the other hand, much of its content is presented in heavy legal language and can be difficult to read. Because of this, you might be tempted to simply skim through the document and continue to use it as your road map. It can be a big mistake because you might tend not to read it carefully.

For example, you may have read the pricing policy of a manufacturer that focuses exclusively on selling online. The flaw here is that the policy may not clearly state, or "loudly", that they are predominantly concerned with selling through e-commerce retailers because the clauses mostly refer to web sales pages and online advertisements. The policy will likely not have a single reference to how it affects brick and mortar store owners.

In this case, if your company deals with both online stores and brick-and-mortar stores, your roadmap policy would be inconsistent (if you simply copied an advertised minimum price model) where guidelines and incentives for brick-and-mortar store owners would not be included. This often happens.

The reverse is also true because copying and pasting the wrong Minimum Advertised Price Policy template can alienate potential retail partners, especially if they don't agree with some of its provisions. The irony is that these clauses are not applicable to your business either. Likewise, this scenario can attract the wrong retail partners to sell your brand.

Suffice it to say, your map policy should be written specifically for your business, rather than constructed with multiple clauses from third-party documents.

You can legally jeopardize your business if you publish a MAP pricing policy template.

You have to be careful because dealer pricing policies can be very confusing, especially when it comes to where the antitrust legal aspects are listed. Many policies found online include language deemed unenforceable or even illegal content about pricing or coercion.

In the US, some states would consider various retail pricing policies for dealers to be blatantly illegal, while some are lenient with them. However, there are certain types of provisions in a manufacturer's advertised pricing policies that are considered illegal and may be enforced in an antitrust suit.

So you should keep in mind that getting map policy templates from the internet and simply substituting your company name in them gives you a decent chance of putting your company at greater risk of getting caught on the wrong side of the federal government, or otherwise , state antitrust regulators .

An even greater legal risk puts your business at risk if you somehow attempt to apply an advertised pricing policy copied and pasted from a template found online without first consulting an expert. First, you need to make sure your compliance policies comply with your state's laws.

It is vitally important that you work with a reputable antitrust lawyer or group of brand protection experts in this regard. Consider that your own reseller pricing program needs to be accurate, relevant and legitimate. You have to be shrewd and careful, and not take risks.

The policy template you copy and paste online could be completely wrong and inaccurate.

The term "map policy" is often used by default to describe manufacturers' guidelines for protecting the resale price of their products. However, you should know that in addition to the Map, there are other types of resale policies.

For example, if, as a manufacturer, you are concerned about the advertised prices of your branded products and, at the same time, the actual resale prices of those products by your retail partners. The applicable policy for this is the MRP, or Minimum Resale Price Policy, which governs the advertised and retail prices of your products.

Another case is the eMap or electronic minimum advertised price policy, which is a map policy that fully protects the advertised prices of your merchandise. In fact, eMap goes even further, limiting how retailers promote their products in the text messages and emails they send to potential customers.