Background
A global manufacturer and retailer faced significant pressure from shareholders to improve profit margins amid macroeconomic headwinds. This required their marketing teams to find ways to drive growth without a proportional increase in media spend.
The challenge was particularly acute across three key emerging markets, each with its own unique economic conditions, including high inflation and a growing e-commerce landscape, as well as a limited brand awareness.
Local marketing teams were relatively new to advanced measurement and needed to answer foundational questions to prove and improve the value of their investments. They wanted to understand the performance of individual channels, how brand and performance media work together to improve ROI, and how to balance short-term sales activation with long-term brand building.
Solution
Gain Theory developed a comprehensive annual marketing mix modeling (MMM) program, delivering a separate, dedicated model for each of the three markets. This approach provided the granularity needed to account for local market nuances, despite limited data. Each model measured the impact of all media investments on total sales, creating a unified view across franchise, retail, and e-commerce channels.
The MMM delivered vital insights, and its broad analysis uncovered channels which grow both brand reach and short-term activation. Using our interactive decision-making platform, Gain Theory Interactive, we also ran multiple scenarios to demonstrate the incremental revenue that could be unlocked simply by rebalancing their existing media budgets between brand-building and performance-focused channels.
A significant part of the solution involved education and change management. Our consultants worked closely with the local teams to help them to interpret the outputs and develop a plan that would help to translate the insights into action.
Results
Our analysis revealed a significant opportunity for growth. We found that all three markets were heavily skewed towards performance media, leading to diminishing returns from key digital channels.
Our recommendation was to shift towards a balanced 50/50 investment split between brand and performance media. The scenario planning demonstrated that this strategic shift alone could generate an additional 25% in incremental revenue across the three markets without increasing the overall budget.
We also identified that an “always-on” media presence would be more effective at driving sustained sales than the existing approach of concentrating investment in large, intermittent campaigns.
Incremental revenue opportunity for no extra spend
