Powering up marketing performance, while decreasing budget

The telecom industry is known to be a complex competitive landscape everywhere in the world. This market is known for having a number of dynamic new players, regularly offering price-disrupting products and services. Traditional players often struggle to differentiate themselves, grow and maintain a loyal customer base.Our client faced a specific challenge due to a critical change in strategic priorities at the company level. Specifically, they had to manage a decrease in marketing budgets due to the need of bigger investments in R&D (5G, IoT, cyber security, artificial intelligence).Despite these budget restraints, their goal was to still increase efficiency across marketing investments and deploy strategic optimizations to better acquire and retain customers.

We used econometric models (MMM, MMO), to explain past performances in a robust, unbiased and holistic manner. To go to the next level, we have leveraged a proprietary and recognized approach called ‘One Vision’, aiming to take a holistic approach to marketing performance. It relies on nested models to provide omnichannel analysis, incorporate an on-par range of non-media business factors, and enable deep dives into specific marketing dimensions such as media, brand, segments, and customer lifetime value. Its capabilities stretch even beyond this by building consumer-facing tools and recommendation engines that leverage the marketing analytics.To complete this approach, we built predictions of future media performance, providing recommendations on scenarios that would improve efficiency with lower budgets.All this work enabled us to distribute strategic data insights and deep dives for every department: offline & online media, promotions, controlling, stores strategy, direct marketing, trade marketing, incentives vendors… while maintaining a high-level approach with top management.We believe that our capacity to navigate between operational and strategic approaches continuously is a strength and was a key success factor in this Marketing Mix Optimization project (MMO).

The project cost was fully recovered thanks to the implementation of the first promotion-related recommendation alone.After implementing our recommendations, we achieved our first year objective of 10% savings in the marketing budget. At the same time, we supercharged performance with a +2.5% in acquisitions.On the human side, we worked very closely with the business lines, which allowed us to foster more synergies during and after the MMM project: making multidisciplinary teams work together more often and making much more consistent decisions across the board (while working in silos before, with different typology of KPI, measurement frameworks, etc.).Finally, on top of our goals, we also brought flexibility in this project, and built adhoc customized approaches on additional business questions.