Optimizing MMM in-Housing: Rebuilding foundations and navigating scenarios
Back to all articles
When strategic and structural roadblocks hinder in-house MMM success, revitalize your marketing measurement capabilities. Our second installment emphasizes critical factors for a comprehensive approach, offering strategies to adeptly navigate scenarios, to streamline and steer performance at scale.
When strategic and structural roadblocks hinder in-house Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)) success, revitalize your marketing measurement capabilities. Our second installment emphasizes critical factors for a comprehensive approach, offering strategies to adeptly navigate scenarios, to streamline and steer performance at scale.
Following our exploration of decoding the challenges of MMM in-housing, we delve into the foundational steps required to rebuild capabilities and align ecosystems, emphasizing the significance of taxonomy, skill development, and internal alignment for a comprehensive approach to Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) insourcing. This second installment also unveils strategies to empower your teams to navigate scenarios for optimal performance at scale.
1. Rebuilding the foundations of MMM in-housing
Are you collecting the right data, in the right place, at the right time? There are three fundamental steps in this process:
- Build standards – To ensure effective MMM in-housing, (re)building standards becomes paramount. Establishing a common language and reference tool creates a "language harmony" among stakeholders. Detailed and precise taxonomy, aligned with organizational structures, enhances data readability and accelerates insights, delivering concrete results to business lines three to six months after the launch of an in-housing program.
- Orchestrate skills development – MMM in-housing is not just about data; it involves people. Orchestrate the development of both technical and human skills. Recruiting individuals with expertise in data science AND marketing is the initial step. To retain them, offer evolving challenges through a data and human resources roadmap, fostering career development. This strategic approach ensures the longevity and commitment of the team building your technology assets.
- Align ecosystem for greater agility – Internally aligning the MMM project with business needs is crucial for scalability. Starting from the business question, making strategic choices, and reworking personas ensure business criticality. A test-and-learn approach becomes a prerequisite to assess your ability to scale up: Conducting a pilot in a specific country or product category allows you to demonstrate added value and ROI.
External alignment is equally vital, involving stakeholders from media agencies to tech players. A hybrid approach, involving a data and marketing mix partner, bridges expertise gaps and facilitates a seamless transformation.
2. Streamlining and steering performance: the power of scenarios
How can you empower your teams?
- Adopt scenario-building for strategic decisions – The adoption phase in MMM in-housing requires thoughtful planning. Empower marketing, finance, and sales teams by helping them understand the benefits. Scenario-building emerges as an essential tool in this process. Teams independently configuring their assumptions leads to increased speed and robust decision-making. This in-housing of scenario-building capacity supports team convictions and provides new perspectives.
- Anticipate scenarios for proactive response – In-house MMM empowers business units to anticipate various scenarios and associated risks. Configuring scenarios for different assumptions allows proactive preparation for the best or worst outcomes. With the ability to react swiftly to unfolding scenarios, business units demonstrate increased agility.
In conclusion, the success of fully or partially in-housing an MMM project lies in its ability to generate short-term gains and sustain a brand over the long term. Key fundamentals include implementing robust data foundations, developing advanced modeling capabilities, and ensuring effective change management. The hybrid format emerges as the most suitable, de-risking scaling efforts and accelerating deployment, ultimately multiplying business impact. A strategic, step-by-step approach is recommended, emphasizing small initiatives and involving the complete marketing ecosystem for optimal results.
