PepsiCo India: retailer loyalty for kirana retailers
In beverage general trade, the cooler is the battlefield: placement, purity (the share of the cooler holding your brand) and visibility decide impulse sales more than any consumer campaign. Compliance has historically been enforced by field audits — expensive, infrequent, and contested between auditor and outlet.
The challenge
PepsiCo needed continuous, verifiable cooler and shelf compliance across a kirana universe far larger than any field force can audit, plus range-stocking behaviour across beverages and snacks — without depending on distributor data feeds that miss the long tail of outlets.
What Unotag did
Invoice-OCR earning without distributor dependency
Unotag deployed its OCR engine — trained across 1.4M+ Indian distributor invoice formats — so any outlet could earn by photographing its purchase invoice. SKU and quantity validation against PepsiCo's master happens automatically. This decoupled the program from distributor system coverage and brought the unserved tail of outlets into a verified data relationship.
Photo-AI cooler and shelf verification
Unotag's vision models were tuned on cooler imagery: scoring purity (competitor product share inside the branded cooler), planogram adherence and shelf-display prominence from outlet-submitted photos. Compliant outlets earn visibility multipliers monthly; the photo trail replaces contested field-audit judgment with evidence both sides accept.
Basket and range-stocking design
Earning logic rewarded breadth deliberately: outlets stocking beverages plus snacks plus current launch SKUs unlocked basket multipliers. Launch SKUs carried first-stock bonuses with shelf-photo proof, compressing the placement lag that launches typically suffer in general trade.
Seasonal scheme cadence
Unotag operationalised PepsiCo's seasonal rhythm — summer beverage windows, festive multiplier periods — as configurable scheme overlays with countdown nudges on WhatsApp, so the program breathes with consumption peaks instead of running flat.
Compliance analytics for sales leadership
Territory dashboards turned compliance into a managed metric: purity and display scores by route and distributor, decay alerts when outlet compliance lapsed, and scheme-response curves showing which incentive structures moved which outlet segments.
The value Unotag added
Compliance became continuous and self-verifying
Photo-AI moved cooler purity from a quarterly audit argument to a monthly, evidence-backed, incentive-aligned behaviour — at a fraction of audit cost.
The unserved outlet tail entered the data
Invoice OCR created verified relationships with outlets no distributor system covered, expanding addressable engagement without new infrastructure.
Launch velocity improved structurally
First-stock bonuses with photographic proof compressed launch placement from a push problem into a pull behaviour.
Field force refocused
With verification automated, field time shifted from auditing to selling — the program absorbed the policing function.
What made it work
1. Photographic verification beats field-audit enforcement on cost, coverage and trust simultaneously.
2. OCR-based earning is the only scalable path to the kirana long tail.
3. Basket multipliers shift range behaviour that per-SKU schemes never move.
Facing the same challenge?
We'll mirror your channel in a sandbox within 48 hours — email support@unomok.com.