Marketing analytics

We can help you to understand where to allocate your marketing money to achieve the greatest results. Our business analytics team has over 15 years of experience working with companies such as BT, Sony, Cadbury's and GSK applying a process to improve their return on marketing investment.

Our approach can help make improvements that, in our experience, result in profit increases of between 5% and 15% or greater over three years. We are so confident of our ability to save you money and generate more business, we often work on a 'fee for results' basis. The return on investment of our consulting costs are normally greater than 10 to 1.

We offer Managing Directors and their teams a process to consider the range of planned marketing investment scenarios open to them over the next 3 years. The objective is to suggest an optimal budget size and show how that budget should be allocated across markets, products (existing and new launches) and marketing activities to meet the specific business criteria such as market share, profit, ROI or the like.

The process provides a robust set of numbers to support the business plans, indeed many clients use the process just prior to budget submission processes for this purpose.

The process can answer questions such as:

• How large should our sales and marketing budget be to achieve our objectives?
• What is the best way to allocate our resources across regions, brands, customer segments and marketing tactics in order to maximise profitability?
• How might changes in the marketplace influence our sales and marketing operations? How should we respond to these changes?
• What is the return on investment from our marketing operations?
• Can we achieve better results or spend less and achieve the same results? How much could we save?
• What should we do if we have to cut x% from the budget? How will the competitive landscape affect our plans?
• How will we ensure that new product / services launches don't affect the right investment for other existing products / services, given limited funds?

Our approach is holistic and involves reviewing the recent past (usually 3 years) to measure the effect of marketing and sales investments such as sales force activity, media, CRM, price and promotional activities on business performance such as market share, sales and profit. Our team uses advanced mathematical techniques, such as transformations and regressions to disentangle and clarify the impact that sales and marketing has demonstrated historically.

Once this has been accomplished, we consider how the future marketing environment will differ from the historical one and model the financial implications of these changes for your business. Finally we put together a profit and loss model to help develop a range of strategies that optimise the returns on future marketing investment.

The process is ideal for:

• Consumer industries such as FMCG, automotive, financial services, retail, consumer electronics, telecoms or those teams investing in excess of £3m per year in marketing and sales activities such as sales forces, media, CRM and promotions
• Teams wanting to make pricing decisions
• Companies entering new markets or launching new products / services