Marketing Mix Modeling & Optimization (MMMO)

Polaris's MMMO platform is a very powerful marketing tool that is helping our Fortune 500 clients measure, optimize and plan their marketing activities. With insight into the performance of all media, including heretofore elusive activities such as brand campaigns, sports sponsorships, and promotions, our clients have a clear understanding of how to adjust to short term impacts on revenue, budgets, conversions, etc. and to develop plans to ensure future performance.

BENEFITS

Quantify Performance

• Measure marketing’s contribution to sales and revenue
• Quantify ROI by media channel, promotion, market, etc.
• Quantify individual media elasticity
• Quantify media synergies

Optimization Your Media Mix

• Allocate budgets across media channels based on critical mass thresholds and economic optimums
• Adjust flighting to maximize synergies and align your media mix with demand
• Determine budgets necessary to reach targets
• Minimize losses when faced with budget cuts

Forecast and Plan Future Performance

• Accurately forecast future performance with an evergreen, continuously improving platform.
• Explore budget or target options with our online, scenario-based planning tool

METHODOLOGY

The Transfer Function Model

Our MMMO solutions are customized for each client based on their business and marketing environment and incorporate a variation of approaches depending on the nature of the challenge. Many of our platforms are transfer-function (multivariate ARIMA) based, while others may be pooled time series (combining markets over time for instance). Regardless of the approach, the ability to incorporate temporal change into the MMMO platforms is critical to the performance of the solutions. Overall, our approach links your marketing mix to your desired outcomes (sales, revenue, etc.) while controlling for issues such as seasonality, competition, pricing, etc., resulting in media/tactic-specific elasticities (i.e., sales/revenue impacts) and quantified cross-media synergies (e.g., lift generated by Radio/TV/Print running simultaneously, etc.).

Advantages of working with Polaris Research in developing your marketing mix optimization program include:

• One equation drives and optimizes business results
  • We use information from one equation to determine media effectiveness, quantify media / tactic contribution, calculate ROI, optimize the marketing mix, and forecast. All roll-ups & breakdowns balance.
  • Many vendors use different equations / approaches for forecasting, ROI decomposition, market roll-downs, etc. As a consequence, results don’t balance add up well.
• Flexibility
  • We can focus on geographies, brands, categories, channels, products, or any combination of these views based on the client’s needs.
• Timely and relevant information
  • Our evergreen platform factors in real-time, fact-based decisions and market changes. As market conditions change, our platform adapts and integrates the impact of these changes into the ROI results reporting and forecasting.
  • Historically, depending on the needs of the client, we have provided ROI reporting and forecasting on a weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly basis.
• Years of media experience but with media neutrality
  • Our senior leaders have a combined 25+ years of internal experience with major media agencies in media planning and research. We know how media work, but Polaris Research is a media-neutral, market research firm.
• System Architect on the account team
  • The client has direct access to and dialog with the architect of our system.
  • With most vendors, clients are “distanced” or “separated” from the architects of the system by layers of account personnel with varying levels of understanding of the approach and capabilities

Call us today to find out how Polaris can maximize the performance of your marketing investments by applying advanced econometric modeling tools to measure, optimize and forecast your marketing performance.