Challenge
- To regain competitiveness, this large global automotive manufacturer undertook a significant rationalization of its name badge portfolio which also required a major reorganization of its efforts across both merchandising and marketing. A new executive management team was open to better ways to balance investments.
- They were looking for a provider that could help them answer some key questions around the right balance of brand media vs. retail media vs. price incentives. Discounting had made up the majority of their spend but the new team had a hard time believing that that was the right thing to do to drive growth going forward.
- Marketscience was chosen as their measurement partner due to their rigorous measurement and consultative approach: as such, they were identified as a unifying approach across the Marketing, Finance and Sales teams.
Solution
- Given the typical car model lifecycle and the need to understand both short and long term drivers, 6 years of data from 50 discrete data sources was gathered and analyzed using the Marketscience proprietary Dynamic Bayesian methodology.
- The short-term and long-term drivers of sales across the full-funnel of the consumer journey from consideration, search, web traffic and sales were identified.
- An innovative purchase intent metric was extracted and used to understand both the long-term impact of brand advertising on sales as well as the interactions of stronger consumer sentiment with incentive pricing.
- Using the budget optimization features of the Marketscience SimOpt tool, the client's marketing and merchandising mix was optimized and reallocated towards a more effective media and promo mix.
Results
- The analysis provided the client with a full-funnel and cross-portfolio view of their short and long-term drivers of sales across 32 nameplates, 4 funnel stages and 210 DMAs.
- The optimization unveiled significant savings to support the nameplate rationalization but with improvements in effectiveness that more than outweighed the reduction in investment.
- A 10% increase in ROI was identified.
- Working with the various parties the Marketscience team developed alignment between the Marketing, Brand, Finance and Sales teams towards common goals.
- The analysis provided such a strong foundation towards a solid marketing effectiveness program that it extended to global initiatives.