Samsung and Asahi prove brand spend drives growth

Summary

• Samsung and Asahi are on a mission to prove that brand spend drives growth
• They’re using Mutinex GrowthOS to uncover insights about long term impact to drive better decision making

Samsung and Asahi use Mutinex GrowthOS to link brand spend to sales

To prove growth through brand spend has traditionally been one of the tougher asks for a marketer. Samsung and Asahi explain how they’re moving towards quantifying the true value of brand using marketing ROI.

Samsung Head of Corporate Marketing, Carl Bunn and Head of Data and Platforms, Megan Quinn, say faster, smarter approaches to tying media investment to sales is boosting marketing’s credibility and enabling a shift away from short-termism while better informing future media budget planning. Here’s how.

Linking media spend to sales is marketing and advertising’s age-old problem. Using standard regression models, even when data can be pieced together, takes months and is therefore already out of date, reducing its value and influence in directing forward-looking marketing investment.

But Asahi and Samsung senior marketers and data specialists are getting closer to cracking the conundrum.

“Historically, particularly in FMCG, it was impossible to attribute your broad media spend to sales,” says Quinn. “There’s so much going on: You have marketing initiatives from the brand, marketing initiatives from the retail network, the impact of pricing, not to mention the impact of competitor activity. As a business, we didn’t have the capability to unpack the impact of each variable on sales, let alone to do this quickly. Getting any kind of meaningful models together, adds Quinn, an economist and econometrician, “took a very long time”.

“What we’ve seen with GrowthOS … is that you have models that actually empower you to make decisions because they’re dynamic. You input the data and within five days you have an analysis of your last month [of media investment performance], which means you can test things and iterate”, adds Quinn.

Prove growth through brand spend

Samsung Head of Corporate Marketing, Carl Bunn, says that belief in marketing return on investment, or MROI, then feeds up the corporate chain.

As an organisation, we can end up prioritising the things we know have an immediacy on sales; such as price or moving product sets around. And that devalues what marketing can – and should – be bringing to the table.”

Hence finding value in smarter econometric models that can help connect marketing and media data with business outcomes, because it helps to prove marketing return on investment beyond short-term tactical approaches.

“One of the more interesting conversations I find about MROI is the short and the long conversation – the value of brand versus the value of short-term sales lead activities,” says Bunn.
“It’s on us to continue to find opportunities for those conversations and find the supporting data. But we’ve made good headway – and tools like GrowthOS are really empowering the team,” Bunn adds.

“It’s one tool in the arsenal, but I see it as [enabling] the start of the conversation. We now have more credibility, how do we continue to drive that forward?”

As seen in Mi3