A consumer goods brand and its variant were once growing across Asia, but were losing sales due to aggressive competition. It also had a typical problem - not knowing clearly what marketing inputs work across market clusters. RainMan's task was to identify the brand's key sales drivers and help effectively allocate resources to maximise ROI.
RainMan built an econometric model by carefully choosing relevant marketing variables, including distribution, advertising, pricing, variants, marketing inputs and competition inputs. Multivariate regression, along with Bayesian shrinkage estimation process then estimated the short-term and long-term impact of various inputs.
The study found various drawbacks and, importantly, prioritized action points to correct them. Distribution quality was the first area, followed by a revamp of the brand's TV creative and media strategies, which were delivering low lift and high decay. Price sensitivity also indicated where prices could be safely raised, where they needed to stay stable and where other sales drivers could negate the decline in sales due to pricing.
The implementation of the new strategy resulted in an increase of marketing ROI by 20% across all market clusters, with a significant growth in sales numbers.