How Accor is redesigning its marketing strategy on a global scale, thanks to Marketing Mix Modeling and the One.Vision platform
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Find out how Accor manages its marketing investments with One.Vision, a Marketing Mix Modeling platform that transforms marketing decision-making into business impact.
In a digital environment that is more and more complex and subject to constant competitive pressure, marketing directors must not only optimize their investments but also be able to demonstrate their profitability. The effectiveness of each action must now prove its worth: What is the actual impact on sales? On customer loyalty? On long-term brand awareness?
In this context, Accor made a bold strategic decision: to transform the management of its marketing investment thanks to data. In partnership with Ekimetrics, this international hotel chain built a Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) strategy on a global scale. Objective: To accurately measure the impact of every euro invested on business performance and identify the levers for sustainable optimization.
To support this approach initiated 8 years ago, Accor progressively deployed One.Vision, an integrated platform created to give local and global teams more autonomy in performance visualization, budget scenario simulation, and decision-making.
But this project is also a cultural transformation. Since, beyond algorithms and tools, all the company—from the headquarters to the regional offices, from the marketing teams to the financial board of directors—is moving toward more data-driven and agile marketing that is directly linked to performance.
Let’s look back at the main learnings from the project, conducted by Accor and Ekimetrics, driven by Stéphanie Jaffré, Global SVP Digital Marketing & eCommerce at Accor, and Soline Aubry, Partner at Ekimetrics.
Measuring what works and what doesn’t work: Why Accor chose Marketing Mix Modeling
- To deal with a very competitive and evolving environment, notably in the digital world
- To reduce the zones of uncertainty around the actual effectiveness of campaigns and levers
- To better manage marketing budgets in a full funnel strategy and avoid saturating historical marketing levers
- To demonstrate the incremental value of actions to stakeholders, including financial board of directors
- To increase collaboration between marketing, finance, communication, and data teams
- To improve the understanding of models among internal teams and make them more autonomous in analyzing and leveraging results
Stéphanie Jaffré, Global SVP Digital Marketing & eCommerce at Accor, sums up the challenge: “Nowadays, with the proliferation of digital levers and the diversity of local contexts, we can no longer manage a global marketing plan solely from benchmarks or hypotheses. Our objective is to answer this question, that appears simple but is in reality very complex: Where should we invest to generate the most value, and how do we justify our choices in concrete terms?”
A scalable methodology with structured management
The success of Accor’s MMM project is based as much on the analytical foundation as on the governance that was rigorously deployed to support the changes.
The project was initiated in the United Kingdom over 8 years ago, on a pilot scope, including the brands Novotel, Mercure and ibis. This first phase aimed to accurately model the impact of marketing investments on direct and indirect reservations. On the strength of these first results, the plan was progressively extended to four more key markets: France, Germany, Australia, and Brazil. It now concerns an extended portfolio of four of Accor’s strategic brands: Ibis, Mercure, Novotel, and Pullman.
The governance continued to adapt as the scope grew. A structured framework was put in place with Ekimetrics to ensure worldwide coherence while respecting local specifics:
- Designation of local and global job champions
- Dedicated training for teams in charge of data and media planning operations
- Internal educational sessions for marketing directors, as well as financial directors, to promote the appropriation of results
- Inclusion of the media agency in several key stages of the process for a better appropriation of results and execution of the defined tactics
- Implementation of a process of continuous improvement, including campaign feedback in the model and its management
This hybrid governance, both centralized and decentralized, has enabled rapid adoption.
One.Vision: A solution created to support teams in moving toward empowerment
Designed to be used at all levels of the organization (global, regional, local), the One.Vision platform is being deployed to the first ten or so employees, to ramp up progressively. It allows each of them to:
- Consult the actual impact of a past or current campaign
- Identify the incremental performance levers
- Build budget allocation scenarios
- Arbitrate based on evidential data, not intuitive insights
6 questions to ask before implementing or expanding your MMM strategy
- Do we have a clear vision of the actual ROI of each of our marketing levers? In the short- AND long-term? Of direct and indirect reservations?
- Is my company equipped with reliable, harmonized, and actionable data?
- Am I ready to integrate data-driven recommendations into my decision-making processes?
- Does my current governance enable effective assimilation and execution of recommendations?
- Do my teams have the maturity to be autonomous in building their budget scenarios, or do they need support during this process?
- At what scale do we want to lead the programme, and with which associated objectives? Headquarters, regional, or national—or all these levels combined?
4 pillars to maximize an MMM strategy’s impact according to Accor
- Reliability of data: Consolidate, cleanse, and structure data from multiple sources into a robust and coherent model
- Explanatory and predictive modeling: Accurately quantify the impact of each lever, predict a marketing plan’s impact, with short-term (e.g., reservations) or long-term (e.g., brand awareness/image) ambitions
- Adoption of results by teams: Guarantee adherence and comprehension, and train each stakeholder to make it more accessible. Several employees now use One.Vision’s results, after developing their skills with support from Ekimetrics’ teams
- Empowerment of teams thanks to a decision-making tool: One.Vision is intended to allow each level of hierarchy (HQ, regions, markets) to examine past performance, test scenarios, and optimize their media mix
The type of questions now managed by data at Accor, thanks to MMM and One.Vision
1. Optimization of marketing plans (CMO, Media directors and managers, agency…)
- Which past campaigns had the most incremental impact or the greatest ROI?
- How can I adapt my marketing mix to improve the management of direct reservations (via the brand’s site) and indirect reservations (via booking agencies)?
- Should I continue to invest in top-of-funnel levers in a context of budget cuts?
- What are the best levers to build better brand awareness?
- Should I reallocate between television and social media? And between YouTube and Meta?
2. Budget management (CMO/CFO/Directors)
- Which budget should I secure to achieve next year’s objectives? And how can I best distribute it across my levers?
- Where should I invest to generate the most revenue or to improve the group’s profitability?
- What impact will a budget cut have? Where will this budget have the least impact on performance?
- Conversely, if I have extra budget, in which lever, brand, or country should I invest to deliver the best impact?
3. Operational decision-making (Campaign managers, media planners…)
- Which combination of levers is the most effective (television + social + search)?
- Which period is the most favorable to launch a campaign?
- Which channels are showing signs of saturation?
- Am I certain that my campaigns are profitable in the short-term AND long-term?
4. Adoption and governance
- How do I ensure that regional teams adopt the recommendations?
- How do I guarantee that the optimizations are correctly implemented locally by teams and/or the agency?
- How do I adapt the business/financial governance to integrate MMM logic into the schedule?
- How do I standardize clear reporting of actions taken via the platform?
The benefits observed at Accor
- A significant increase in identified incremental revenue
- Systemic integration in budgetary decisions of recommendations made by the programme
- Better cooperation between business functions, marketing, finance, e-commerce, and agencies… on common KPI data
- Marketing teams are more independent in their media arbitration plans, even without advanced analytical resourcing
- A short-term (reservations) and long-term (brand awareness, brand image…) vision, at channel, campaign, country, or brand scale
- Control granular to the brand and to the country (e.g., Novotel in Australia ≠ Novotel in France), taking local specifics into account
“In certain areas, we have been able to secure the equivalent of more than a million euros thanks to the model”, explains Stéphanie Jaffré, emphasizing a key point: “This gain isn’t linked to an increase in budget but simply to better allocation.”
Next steps
- Speed up the deployment of the One.Vision platform across the whole scope of the programme
- Extend the programme’s coverage for better coverage of marketing budgets
- Further automate data flows to allow more frequent model updates
- Strengthen the continuous improvement cycle with an end-to-end feedback loop
- Continue the acculturation efforts and train new operational profiles within recently launched markets
- Deploy the new One.Vision module, which integrates agentic AI—an artificial intelligence that is not just conversational but able to guide, recommend, and predict the most relevant budgetary trade-offs, regardless of the user’s maturity level
Conclusion
Accor took the bold gamble of establishing Marketing Mix Modeling at the heart of its marketing management strategy. This approach combines analytical excellence, new-generation technological tools (One.Vision), governance, and progressive acculturation of local and global teams.
It demonstrates that, with an adapted governance, a well-thought-out platform, and a model based on robust data, marketing measurement can become as much a driving force for change as a performance lever.
The future of MMM is being written right now at Accor—no longer as a report, but as a tool for action, optimization, and sustainable growth.
👉 Learn more about the Accor business case.
👉 Learn more about our Marketing Mix Modeling solution.
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