The Background

A major retail brand tasked us with helping them to drive an additional 10% sales return from media activity – without increasing their overall media budget.

The Challenge

Working with media agencies they had developed marketing strategies focused on broadcasting the brand’s messages to consumers in the most efficient way. This produced a broad mix of channels used across the brand’s key campaigns. However, a vital missing piece in this strategy was the knowledge of how effective those communication channels were in driving sales. To achieve increased returns they needed to know whether a different channel mix could be applied to produce greater results.

Our Solution

We initially met with brand stakeholders to develop a full understanding of the current process, as well as the business context behind all of the objective (not just those listed) that the brand were trying to achieve. Combining stakeholder interviews with an investigation of the data sources, Gain Theory identified the need to apply a Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) approach, allowing the brand to better understand their KPIs and test different hypotheses about the various factors influencing them.

The Results

Our solution generated data driven insights for the client to help improve ROI by identifying:

Major influencing factors that impacted sales, including each media channel that had been used by the brand over the last 3 years.

Return on investment for each channel.
Rate of return from increasing or decreasing levels of investment in those channels.
Opportunities where spending more on some channels generated the highest positive impact on sales, whilst removing money from other channels had the minimum impact.

The Take Away

The brand’s mix of media channels could be rebalanced to generate 24% higher returns from activities, far more than the initial target of 10% that was set and equating to multi-million £ improvement in overall sales gained.