We recently delivered a marketing assessment to a marketing team led by someone who had recently come from a large chewing gum brand.  He relayed a story that gave us a real-world validation of our analytical results.

At his prior brand, they had used Marketing Mix Modeling to measure the impacts of his marketing activities.  The contribution was measured at about 20% of his total sales volume, which meant that without marketing, his sales would have only been 80% of what they actually were.

Due to larger corporate circumstances (he didn’t elaborate), they had their marketing budget taken down to zero.  It’s pretty rare that one of our outputs gets tested directly, but in this case that’s just what happened.  And indeed, sales were off by 21% the following year- a little bit more than what was measured, though of course there were other factors at play on the total.

But the reason he told the story was not just to demonstrate that there was other evidence of the near-term impact of marketing, but that the brand continued to decline even after marketing spend was restored.  His point was that without the advertising, he not only lost the direct impact on volume, but the long-term brand health decayed to such an extent that it was extremely expensive to rebuild.