More than 60 percent of Fortune 1000 Chief Marketing Officers cannot quantify the impact of marketing in both the short and long term. This dramatic figure, despite significant investments in data and analytics, illustrates 2 of the main challenges of marketers: measurement and decision-making.
These challenges are especially important for CPG players
With CPG companies being the highest marketing spenders from all sectors (nearly 11% of their revenue), this is particularly damaging, as:
- There is fierce competition and decreasing growth.
- Rapidly growing complexity across media channels and content creation
- Increasing pressure to measure and justify marketing RoI
Current measurement and decision-making tools can’t tackle the challenges of marketing complexity.
CPG manufacturers and retailers are mostly reliant on traditional data analytics and Business Intelligence solutions, although the number of challenges faced by marketing teams is ever increasing, with hundreds or thousands of interdependent decisions to be constantly made. This is leading to an unprecedented level of complexity:
Consumers segments are more fragmented than ever.
Pricing and promotions, a hugely complex area, are intertwined with all the other marketing decisions, and can’t be considered in isolation.
Marketing has to manage expansion of channels and messages, and time contraction, with key questions to solve:
What is the optimum absolute budget level?
How should the overall budget be best spend, in which media, with which campaigns and content?
How can media investment be optimised, assessing in-flight effectiveness and adjusting in real-time?
Making optimised commercial decisions
Often commercial decisions are not linked to company goals (like sales and market share, profitability, brand equity, etc.). To maximise the expected outcomes, whether tactical and short-term, or strategic and longer-term, the challenges to be solved are at many levels:
Define the effective budget level that will enable goals achievement.
Allocate the marketing budget between brands, media channels, campaigns.
Holistically optimise all investment drivers (including price, promotions, shopper marketing).
AI enables Marketing best practices in measurement and decision making
In the new world of Zero-Based Budgeting, every investment driver needs to be measured and continually evaluated.
Only AI powered analytics can cope with the complexity of interdependent investment drivers and the new marketing reality of multiple media channels and content profilication.
Only AI powered analytics can provide predictive, always-on modelling that enables in-flight optimisation.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are game changers for marketing, sales, and supply management decision making.
Learn more: how AI can transform RoI and create unique advantages from data, what are the best practices of adoption for maximum impact.
In London (UK) on November 16. Attend Singular Intelligence’s and Microsoft’s event on “transforming RoI and agility in marketing and supply-planning decisions through AI”.
You just need to register here for free: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/transform-roi-agility-in-marketing-supply-planning-decisions-through-ai-registration-49336987257
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Jean Littolff (ex Nielsen and GfK) is CRO at Singular Intelligence; Sarvesh Kumar is Founder and CEO of Singular Intelligence; Steve Gladwell (ex Pladis / United Biscuits) is the Industry Director at Singular Intelligence; www.singularintelligence.com