What you need to know:

• Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) is enabling marketers to be more involved in more business decisions than they have been in a long time, Samsung head of solutions and DTC, Carl Bunn, told attendees at last week’s Mutinex Marketers & Money event in Sydney during a panel discussion.
• For Bank of Queensland GM of retail marketing, Melody Townsend, it’s also providing a platform to wrestle back control of product for marketing teams, as well as go beyond a price conversation in the current tough consumer economic climate.
• With marketing ROI evolving as a result of modelling and more data sets, both executives acknowledged marketing finally has a way to go beyond mediacentric and marketing-centric metrics and talk in a similar language to the rest of the business. And that’s key: There’s no avoiding the need to be commercially literate as a modern marketer.
• But there’s still an education process marketers need to orchestrate to gain buyin for these new marketing attribution narratives. It’s one that requires transparency, contextualisation and even more commerciality to embed into culture and gain cross-functional buy-in, the pair said.
• Per Townsend: “People have really short memories and they're asking: Why aren't your numbers as good as last week? It doesn't matter if your competitor has just dropped a huge campaign in market and sucked all that acquisition in their direction. By having these realtime metrics, people can see what's going on and how it's affecting the conversion funnel all the way through.”
• Winning the battle between brand and performance is the next step for both, with MMM cited as a key way of tipping the see saw more in brand’s direction – again, if you can get your narrative right Hint: It’s still about data).

The value equation

The good news: Marketing mix modelling (MMM) is allowing marketers to wrestle back control more of those 4Ps they should have had all along. The bad news? You’re still going to need to speak the financial language of the business to ensure stakeholders get it and back your decisions – all while educating them on new-look marketing ROI.

“Marketers have been – at least in our organisation – more involved in more decisions than we have in a long time,” Samsung head of solutions and DTC, Carl Bunn, told attendees during a panel session on how marketers are making faster marketing ROI decisions at last week’s Mutinex Marketing & Money event in Sydney. “What comes with that is a lot more responsibility, but also a lot more data. The thing which really holds for us is just being clear on what we're trying to achieve and what’s important for any given category or product.”

The question Mutinex co-founder and chief, Henry Innis, posed was how both executives are navigating the incredible array of sales channels available to them using modelling today, as well as increased volumes of data.

For Samsung’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) team, there’s the added complication of different buyer lifecycles as the company builds everything from mobile phones and consumer electronic devices to less frequently purchase products such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines and refrigerators.

“What's important is we're clear on what we're trying to achieve within each of those categories,” Bunn said. “But then it’s bringing that back to the organisation in order to measure performance consistently… We put a lot of work into the tools and techniques to be able to do that, to upskill people, take people on that journey then report back on success over time.”

At Bank of Queensland, GM of retail marketing, Melody Townsend, oversees six brands including ME Bank. While empowering the humans to make decisions is a key first step in embracing next-gen MMM, ruthless prioritisation is a close second.  

“How we start to think about decisioning across so many brands with finite resources is absolutely about the value equation,” she said. “Where are we looking to maximise growth? And how much investment do we need to facilitate that growth? That’s versus something else that maybe a trade-off and this year isn’t going to get the same level of investment it got last year.

“They’re really tough conversations to have – you want to love all your children equally but sometimes you can't.”

Given the acute cost-of-living economic environment banks are operating in and the squeeze on mortgages, it's all about winning in high-interest savings accounts for banks right now, Townsend said. But that doesn’t mean just promoting whatever is on offer, or competing on price.

“What’s perhaps more interesting is how can marketers affect longer-term product proposition development,” she said. A recent example at BOQ is a new charity proposition introduced in the Me Go mobile app experience.  “You can imagine in a bank going to the business and saying, we really passionately believe that every time a consumer taps their digital wallet, we should donate on their behalf to a charity,” Townsend said. “When you're multi-brand, you're talking about scaling technology and being ubiquitous across your offering. We're trying to put more options into technology, add variations. That’s a much harder conversation to have with technology and the business. But I think it's where marketers have to push more.

“If you don't have product in your remit, how do you continually push the boundaries around this is where we need to be playing to affect the longer-term customer growth or brand experience?”

The MROI conversation

The crux of the conversation, however, was how marketers evolve marketing ROI by contextualising what they’re seeing through new tools like MMM.

“Firstly, I want to recognise at least we are having a conversation about ROI because traditionally, we were taking very media-centric and marketing-centric metrics,” Bunn said. “The fact we're able to talk in a very similar language to the rest of the organisation gives a lot more credibility.

“The next step is around how we exploit more of what is ROI, and show each marketing dollar is generating a return. You generally have to balance that with what we are trying to achieve and what is ROI in that context.”

For example, a priority for Samsung is bringing in new DTC customers to buy direct. “We can have really efficient spend, but we also need to see absolute average product spend in customer and lifetime value go up,” Bunn said.

Over at BOQ, Townsend’s team used to “try and dazzle finance with amazing marketing presentations and animations” to tell the story of MROI.

“Creative is so important and we love it to bits, but in a bank talking to the CFO, we have had to adjust our way to suit their way,” she said. “I do take in Excel spreadsheets. I will be showing them if you want this amount of new balance growth into the bank, that means it's this many customers, at this CPA, so give me this much money and this is what I will bring you. But the caveat: Because we are marketers and don't just want to be about the numbers, we then say with that spend, I will also be able to start to drive an uplift in brand. And with that, we will bring more efficiency to our dollar because we're not just driving the immediate term, we're driving the longer-term value as well.”

Another vital element of MROI evolution is finding the people that matter in your business – the stakeholders, purse string pullers and influencers – and getting them onside, Townsend said. “Take them through your numbers, make them advocates for your ROI methodology. It's really important.”

You’re sharing in their ambitions as well then, Bunn added. “That’s rather than trying to educate them on what we think is important… it changes the approach in our organisation and conversations that are happening.”

Benn also agreed it’s becoming harder to attribute using classical methodology. “That's still going to have a place though. I think the frequency and timeliness of being able to optimise in those environments can't really be ignored,” he said.

“We supplement it with other metrics, whether it's other models like econometric modelling, which is helping us to then look holistically at a campaign over a period of time, and what's the impact we're having on the overall organisation so we can help to offset some of the attribution at the micro level.”

The buy-in imperative

All this leads to having a greater measurement framework that's bought into, clear and transparent to the organisation, encapsulating different measurement techniques to be able to understand where ROI shows up, Bunn said. Similarly, Townsend is building out real-time dashboards to get more people across the numbers daily.

“It's a really tough environment when you're getting outspent four to one in some cases as a challenger brand,” she commented. “People have really short memories and they're asking: Why aren't your numbers as good as last week? It doesn't matter if your competitor has just dropped a huge campaign in market and sucked all that acquisition in their direction. By having these real-time metrics, people can see what's going on and how it's affecting the conversion funnel all the way through.”

In embedding decision-making frameworks into the business, Townsend also noted BOQ doesn’t have a marketing analytics function and navigates a shared analytics scenario. Having a marketing planning and effectiveness manager as the “glue” between internal teams and agency partners – media in particular – to get data into the right format to inject into the models has been vital.

Then there’s getting the language of MMM itself understood. “There's a lot of terms Mutinex brought to us we'd never heard before and as Henry knows all too well, we would call him every other day saying sorry what was that?” Townsend said.

Bunn echo the sentiment. “There's a massive transition for individuals not classically used to dealing with some of these numbers to understand what it means. We try to bring those teams together, co-locate them, and really help to upskill.”

Data accuracy, along with making sure it reliably shows up and is relevant in context, are also vital.

“We can bring data to the team at the wrong time and no one's going to listen to because it's not the problem they're currently facing or what they're thinking about,” Bunn said. “The way we solve that is by understanding specifically what the business wants, showing up at the right time, then literally sitting next to them to help them through that journey. Sometimes it's hard to know what questions to ask, or what the next step should be. That's where the magic of the expert on the marketing side and analytics side work it out.”

For Townsend, it’s marketing’s job to then tell the story. “Take the insights, explain the story to the stakeholders. They don't need to know the data methodology, they just need to know we know it,” she advised.

“If they want to see the data and they want that validation, we will provide it, but it's not the starting point. It can just take us down rabbit holes we just don't need to go.”

The brand sell

Over the next year, Townsend’s battle is proving brand and performance marketing can coexist.

“I can't be the only one here fighting for every brand dollar, and this is where it [MMM] really starts to help,” she said. “I've tried every presentation, to create the passion and love for the brand and show them all the presentations and all the creative. Ultimately, where it lands is I have to have the data to validate there is real value in brand. That’s what the model's offering. That's what we will continue to squeeze out of it.”

Bunn said Samsung’s e-commerce team knows it’s heavily relying on investment from a brand perspective from product divisions.

“The models we've built with Mutinex allow us to see the benefit of both elements of that. Traditionally it’s been more around performance and where we're spending, then the impact of brand on that same output,” he said.  

“It becomes a really good way to justify some of these conversations around where budget investment needs to be made, then defending that position.”