How limited data access constrains marketing-mix analytical efforts: Why data barriers are preventing marketers from optimizing marketing spend

This article examines marketing-mix models and how data issues are limiting marketers’ capabilities. As the Internet grew in the nineties, challenges emerged for the availability of causal data that fueled marketing-mix models, as it created difficult-to-measure touchpoints.

INTRODUCTION

Marketing-mix models fundamentally are designed to measure the impact on brand sales of each of the key elements of a brand’s marketing mix. Broadly, marketing-mix modeling consists of statistical analyses, such as multivariate regressions, using sales and marketing time-series data to estimate the impact of various marketing tactics on sales.

Marketers rely on these models to optimize their marketing spending by using them to determine how they should allocate their marketing budget among the various alternative tactics. Once the models are built, it is possible to run alternative scenarios of marketing spending across tactics and optimize that spending as...

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