Human health and your brand’s marketing efforts have something in common: they can’t be quantified by a single number.
As we know from routine visits, medical professionals always begin by reviewing a multitude of vitals (e.g. pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, age, weight, cognitive responsiveness). Then, they dig in to ask more questions about your family medical history, recent activity, changes in lifestyle and more.
This is how they best diagnose, treat, and optimize for future health and wellness: taking the vitals that matter most and layering on the context in which those vitals exist.
This is a lesson that directly translates to marketing. To best diagnose results and optimize for business growth, brands must identify the metrics that matter most and layer on the context in which those metrics exist.
With these simple foundations, strategists and marketers can use analytical rigor, intuition and creative thinking to highlight patterns within the data. This is where real ambitious growth comes from — understanding the patterns in a brand’s business and market, and using those insights to capture a stronger share of category growth.
Mythic has developed a simple framework for measuring the full impact of marketing in a way that makes it easier for our clients and prospective partners to see these patterns and drive confident decision-making.
Measurement that drives ambitious growth requires connecting analysis at three impact levels:
Commercial Impact - a measurement framework should evaluate the full impact of commercial success
Brands need their campaigns to deliver true business results. Diagnosing where and how marketing is influencing the health and growth of the business is the foundational goal of all marketing measurement. Driving sales is table stakes. Modern measurement needs to go deeper than sales to help understand how marketing is driving growth, and we need to look at impact beyond sales as well to assess all the different ways our marketing investments are creating value. Going deeper than sales means measurement should deconstruct sales into the relevant drivers for that category: growth among key segments, recurring vs. new customers, average transaction value, sales by region or retailer. Going beyond sales means measurement should be built to track other drivers of profit and value growth for the organization, such as price sensitivity, brand valuation and stock price/organization value. Measurement frameworks need to keep up, holding campaigns accountable beyond direct, in-platform ROAS.
Connecting metric fluctuation to marketing tactics requires systemic access to granular performance data: sales by business unit, product line, distributor, geography, by week or by day and by customer group. The more granular the data, the more opportunities we have to analyze and identify the patterns that are within our control (media investment, brand equity, creative messaging, CRM activity), and those outside (pricing and distribution changes, macroeconomic conditions).
Through this structure, Mythic is able to deconstruct sales volume into 1) base sales that would occur without any additional marketing support, 2) sales that are derived from brand and recent marketing investment in building future demand, and 3) sales that are a direct result of concurrent marketing designed to capture current demand. Most agencies focused on connecting results back to business performance only seek to diagnose if the sales trend is changing. At Mythic, we know it is crucial to focus on incremental growth from marketing and continuing to invest in making future sales easier to capture. Proper measurement allows us to not only prove our impact, it helps balance strategic priorities in future marketing efforts.
Key Tools: Marketing Mix Modeling, Econometric Modeling and Commercial Analytics (price sensitivity, growth geographies, customer segments), Short-term Sales Impact (direct observable sales, ROMI), Brand Valuation
Perceptual Impact - a measurement framework should evaluate the longer-term impact of brand perception
Like we said, driving sales is tablestakes. At Mythic, we strive to go beyond short-term gains and focus on building long-term demand.
Nearly two-thirds of advertising's total return on investment is realized more than 12 weeks after a campaign runs (Bera.ai & Analytic Partners). This means that brands are likely undervaluing the business impact of campaigns and misunderstanding which tactics are driving the most profitable growth. The most effective measurement frameworks consider longer-term impact.
The best way to diagnose the longer-term impact of advertising is by tracking how marketing is influencing brand perception. This is a clear proxy for future demand. Nielsen data confirms that a single point increase in brand consideration translates to a 1% increase in sales in future periods.
Measuring for Perceptual Shift includes tracking the scale of the brand's impact on perceptions (how widely the brand is known and positively perceived) as well as how clearly the brand's perception is linked to meaningful audience needs. Taken together, these measures comprise the Mental Market Share a brand has captured.
Key Tools: AAU studies, Brand Health Tracking, CEP Benchmarking and Mental Market Share, Distinctive Brand Asset Testing, Share of Search
Campaign Impact - a measurement framework should consider how campaign optimization might drive portfolio-wide improvements
Finally, we focus on building a healthy campaign. Our intention in measuring performance at a campaign level is not to determine if and how successful a campaign is in driving sales, but to determine which elements of the campaign are delivering as expected, and which can work harder.
Because modern marketing plans are complex, we must work to measure the impact of the portfolio as a whole. This has implications for how campaigns are constructed in-platform, and for the KPIs and measurement technology used to connect different data streams for analysis.
At Mythic, we don’t believe in blackbox technologies or techniques that cannot be explained to the average marketer. Our clients know and demand accountability they can count on. To diagnose the health of our campaigns, we set clear expectations for what each tactic is intended to accomplish within the portfolio, connected to a set of metrics that will diagnose how strongly it delivers.
There is no single metric or KPI that explains performance; however, in partnership with our clients we build systems that identify where and how the campaign is delivering audiences at scale, capturing disproportionate attention volumes, resonating emotionally and driving action. These are all crucial components of a campaign system that drives ambitious and lasting growth.
Key Tools: Attention Measurement, Emotional Response Testing, Unified Media and Path to Conversion Data (media delivery and engagement data, fraud/viewability monitoring, digital analytics, foot-traffic lift, retail sales data)
Putting the System Together
This approach requires a team fluent in multiple forms of data, who can manage data flowing from disparate sources and find the patterns that lead to growth.
At Mythic, we work with our clients to build custom measurement approaches that always account for tracking at each of these three levels: Commercial Impact, Perceptual Impact, and Campaign Impact, to drive profitable, sustainable and ambitious growth. Structuring our relationships and campaigns to generate proof of performance as we partner together allows each party to have a clear understanding of common goals and a reliable system for identifying new ways to grow.
Ready to build a measurement framework that can help your brand achieve ambitious growth? Reach out to newbiz@mythic.us to get started.
