How Top Brands are Turning Challenges into Growth Opportunities

While businesses have faced challenges in every arena from consumer behavior shifts spurred by the pandemic to data deprecation, there is one factor separating those that are thriving from those that are falling behind: the ability to see challenges through a lens of opportunity. Recently, we gathered stories from top brands that are finding growth and success in the current landscape. From harnessing innovation to mastering organizational adoption and beyond, read on to find out how a holistic measurement framework is playing a key role in driving success.

Reaching Growth Goals Through Holistic Measurement

One retail business faced major challenges from data deprecation due to walled gardens, privacy regulations and consumer behavior that added to measurement difficulties and reduced coverage. But rather than allow these challenges to derail it, the business instead used them as a catalyst for innovation and growth. A holistic measurement framework built on a foundation of Commercial Mix Analytics (CMA) addressed the overall business, providing a way out of siloed decision-making and transforming cross-functional work by offering a single source of truth. By being adaptive, CMA can incorporate multiple dimensions tailored towards key decisions, fostering further organizational adoption while simultaneously future-proofing decisioning by offering the ability to evolve the measurement program based on changing needs and retail landscape. Ultimately, this solution uncovered opportunities for an additional $30 million in sales and increases in ROI by 20%, all while keeping spend static. This opportunity included a rejuvenated $13 million growth in new customer acquisition, reversing the previous downward trend.

Another organization in the pet care space is on the forefront of a holistic analytics program, leveraging Commercial Mix Analytics as a foundation for supporting analyses that are built in a CMA framework. Commercial mix models provide robust, granular insights to support strategic and tactical decisions. This framework allowed for a number of lenses, with key ones for this exercise being shorter-term impact on sales, longer-term brand penetration and overall ROI. By implementing this framework, the brand was able to unite stakeholders around a single source of truth and increase the pace of organizational adoption of the measurement program – and the trust placed in the results. Through consistent deployment of the program, in CYTD 2020 alone, the company actioned and gained over $20MM in margin opportunities based on prior year recommendations

Achieving Organizational Buy-In

One major grocery retailer faced roadblocks to meet their desire to evolve into a holistically data-driven modernized marketing organization and sought to overcome the challenges of historically slow performance insights and the resulting skepticism. The brand set out to advance from analytics with limited cross-functional collaboration and “marketing-only” tools that made it difficult to reach consensus and communicate impact. By transitioning to a holistic Commercial Mix Analytics solution, the company was able to quickly surface results that were trusted across the organization to drive adoption and collaboration during a difficult year. Despite unprecedented external challenges, this program provided an incremental annual impact of almost $100MM in its first full fiscal year.  The application of the insights led to a 16% increase in media efficiency in the first full year, with more longer term opportunities in progress, and the impact was 22MM more physical and digital visits annually.

Teams across the organization were impacted by this innovation in analytics; most importantly impacted was Senior Management. There is now a thorough understanding of the role that each type of marketing and non-marketing factor has on business performance which provides an unparalleled degree of confidence in decision making. The brand’s executive leadership team and board now ask about insights for business units that we will be analyzing in the second half of the year, and insights for new launches and go-to-market strategies. One of the biggest signals of success for any business initiative is whether the analysis impacts decision making and adoption – and a key to this is senior management buy-in and trust.

An Eye on Innovation

At the start of 2020, one majority brick & mortar retailer was poised with a new multi-year plan to take the business into the digital age with a focus on omnichannel. Just a few weeks after the plan’s approval, the chain found itself with 80% of its stores closed and was forced to move from a traditional brick & mortar business to an agile, iterative business.

Intrinsic to that move was a full shift in the marketing strategy, moving away from traditional, long-lead advertising that drove in-store traffic to flexible advertising that drove online engagement, class registration and online purchasing. To do this, the brand embraced an agile, holistic measurement process rooted in Analytic Partners’ Commercial Mix Analytics. The CMA solution was innovative in its ability to deliver an understanding of the full spectrum of business impact from marketing investment, including online and offline, multi-touch, and fractional attribution.  It was able to act as a central source of truth that teased apart impact across marketing, promotional, and external drivers.

Thanks to an agile measurement program, CMA Live, the retailer was able to deliver revenue growth despite a significant disruption in operations with store closings and other factors hindering growth. In fact, the Return on Ad Spend improved over 70% in 2020. With an understanding of the online and in-store impacts from different channels, the brand was able to flex its budget to support ecommerce and/or stores as needed through a tumultuous year.

Building a Framework for the Future

Whether the goal is growth, innovation or fostering organizational change, a strong foundation of holistic measurement is helping major brands reach their goals despite today’s complex landscape. Find out more about Commercial Mix Analytics and how it can power your business strategy here.