2. John Tomlin IKM
Marketing Return on Investment
We help the world’s leading marketers achieve exceptional return on investment.
Key
• Prioritize marketing spend across geographies and products,
• Define the right messages for customers,
• And, find the optimal mix of vehicles among today’s wide variety of media types.
The marketing opportunity
Global marketing spend exceeds $1 trillion, which makes it between 1 to 2 percent of global GDP.
Marketing spend has been rising faster than the top line for several decades. In our experience,
15 to 20 percent of marketing spend can be released through better marketing return on
investment (MROI) efforts, either for reinvestment for growth or return to bottom line. That’s up to
$200 billion globally per year. (See McKinsey & Co Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum’s
collection of articles on MROI.)
The challenge of marketing
Marketers face many challenges today, including
• High growth expectations,
• Cutthroat competition,
• And the digital and social-media revolution.
Embracing MROI as a discipline can help build strong brands that generate improved returns.
Our core beliefs
• Better MROI starts with better objectives that are based in the client decision journey
(CDJ). Better marketing objectives, in turn, shape better metrics.
• Brand messaging is one of the most important determinants of MROI success. It is more
important to be clear on the most effective messaging attributes for the given brand
objective than it is to have a precisely optimized marketing mix.
• Marketing-mix analytics that do not make sense to the end business user are useless.
Marketing-mix models should be informed by industry knowledge, built with transparent
assumptions, and delivered in a way that makes sense intuitively to the business user.
3. John Tomlin IKM
• Marketing-investment decisions need to factor in both short- and long-term impact.
Marketing mix models, for example, can capture only short-term impact and must be
augmented with long-term (brand-building) impact estimates.
• Future potential is a critical input. Spend should be biased toward future growth, and not
just optimized based on past performance.
• Ultimately, driving marketing spend effectiveness comes down to capabilities, processes,
and talent. Invest in your organization (not just your data) to build and sustain excellence in
MROI.
Our five-step approach
1. Spending priorities: Understand where all consumer-facing dollars are being spent at an
enterprise-wide level. Include all working and nonworking spends across all geographies,
brands, marketing vehicles, etc. Ensure that enterprise-wide spend allocation is aligned
with the company's strategic priorities and with the avenues of future growth.
2. Message definition: Understand deeply CDJ, and clarify the priority “battlegrounds” for your
brand. Clarify the messaging and identify the marketing vehicles that will be most effective
at moving consumers through the selected stage in the CDJ.
3. Marketing mix: Pick an approach based on business needs, data availability, and analytical
preferences and stick to it. Look at three approaches—benchmarks, advanced
econometrics, and consumer surveys —, which can be used independently or together.
Don’t forget business judgment.
4. Spend efficiency: Optimize marketing spend through lean techniques and purchasing
controls. Find opportunities to reduce nonworking spend (for example, agency
consolidation, research-vendor appraisal) and improve buying efficiencies on working
media (such as best-practice procurement and optimized time-length).
5. Sustainability: Drive sustainable impact through all the classic organization levers. Instill
best-practice capabilities, supported by ROI tools and processes, key performance
indicators, and by senior-level behaviors. Make marketing an investment, not a cost center.
Examples of our work
• Optimized the marketing mix of an insurance carrier by geography, distribution channel,
and marketing message
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• Optimized both online and offline investments of an apparels company and measured the
impact of earned social media on performance
• Completed a multiphase commercial transformation enabled by advanced marketing-mix
modeling (MMM), including a rapid diagnostic, proof of concept, and capability building for
a direct-selling company
• Created transparency on the MROI of multiple brands for the board of directors of a
multimillion dollar food company, with results presented to the “investors”
• Increased revenue for a food retailer without increasing marketing spend by applying
econometrics to understand impact across all key commercial levers (See “Big data &
advanced analytics: Success stories from the front lines,” Forbes)
Proprietary tools and solutions
John Tomlin’s approach to MMM is a holistic data-models-organization approach that is designed
to tap big data, creatively fill data gaps, demystify the analytical “black box,” and engage
marketers in the exercise. The goal is to create models that the business understands and trusts
and therefore uses to change future marketing plans. (See “5 steps to squeeze a lot more ROI
from your marketing,” Forbes)
John Tomlin’s Benchmarking/Reach-Cost-Quality media mix optimization tool provides the most
relevant criteria to measure marketing effectiveness, allowing precise allocation of funds across
marketing vehicles.
John Tomlin’s Social GRPTM quantifies the impact of social media by measuring the frequency
and reach of positive, negative, and neutral social-media sentiment. (See “Getting beyond the
buzz: Is your social media working?” Financial Times)
John Tomlin’s Short-Term/Long-Term methodology is able to put a value on long-term brand
equity and enable trade-offs between short-term and long-term outcomes.
CMAC
The MROI service line is part of John Tomlin's Consumer Marketing Analytics Center (CMAC).
CMAC accelerates your ability to capture the potential of big data by driving insights from
advanced analytics into action across your marketing and consumer-facing organization. CMAC's
global team of advanced analytics practitioners have deep expertise in data, approaches,
proprietary tools, client industries, and best practices for organizational transformation. In addition
5. John Tomlin IKM
to MROI, CMAC delivers impact in pricing, promotions, customer life-cycle management, and
assortment-optimization programs across retail, consumer goods, banking, insurance, telecom,
media, and health-care organizations. To support our advanced analytic work we can host client
data in our ISO-certified data center. CMAC has high-quality, cost-efficient advanced analytics-
offshoring capabilities through our Centers of Competence.
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Who Are We
John Tomlin IKM is a management consulting company addressing the SME sector data,
information and knowledge strategy needs with a strong focus on innovative and value-creating
solutions.
We offer full service Business Strategy/Knowledge Strategy Alignment solutions – intellectual
capital strategy, structural/organization capital, risk management, and human capital.
Structure Capital: translating the vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating,
communication, and improving key requirements, principles, and models that describe the clients’
future state and enable their evolution: Enterprise Architecture; Enterprise Solutions; Enterprise
Infrastructure; and Enterprise-Wide Application
Organization Intellectual Capital: the ability to reason, plan, predict, solve problems, think
abstractly, comprehend, innovate and learn in ways that increase organizational knowledge,
inform decision processes, enable effective actions, and help to establish and achieve business
goals: Business Intelligence & Analytics; Information Architecture; and Digital Asset Management
Risk Management Policies: Policies, procedures, systems, and practices relative to legal, security,
and protection issues: Legal, Security, and Identity & Access Management
Human Capital: The human-to-human and human-to-structural collaboration with the clients’
strategic alignment & execution, integrated change & project management, strategic performance
measurement and anticipating future needs
We deliver high performance superior value of individualized solutions versus the standardized
options offered by traditional consulting houses.
