Setting the Communications Budget
...ovides convincing evidence to the contrary. This points to the need for frequent interaction and communication between the modelling and marketing teams. • Pre-modelling interviews with key personnel (brand/marketing team, finance, sales, advertising, media, etc.) to help understand what drives the brands being analysed and what different departments want from the project. • Frequent working sessions during the modelling process to ensure models are realistic and to help get buy-in. • Availability of the modelling team beyond the final presentation to help integrate the model into planning and ensure its correct use. Also to feed back learning as the model is used. To make it work successfully the modeller must be an all-round consultant, with good statistical skills, good communication skills and a good marketing/business brain. A number of other factors have changed over the past ten years, which affects the way statistical analysis should be carried out. • Data have improved. There are more data, produced more frequently, from a variety of sources. This is part of the reason why marketing teams are now more knowledgeable, but there is often too much data to handle easily. Today's analysis has to work with different types of data (sales, research, qualitative) based on different time periods and samples. • Technology has improved. On the negative side, software advances allow us to produce ever more data on subgroups, target audiences and so on. Sometimes it is forgotten that decisions are based on very small, unreliable samples. It is also easy to over-trust the output from software without questioning the results. On the positive side we have the technological power to handle today's mass of data, and to develop software to ensure that our analysis is tailored to the project. • Decisions have moved from brand-centric to corporate-centric decisions. Many companies have a portfolio of international brands. Marketing issues involve allocation of resources between brands, or between countries for a given brand, or both. If modelling one brand has become complex, modelling a portfolio across several countries is even more so. But it can and should be done. Signifi...