Marketing Mix Modeling: A holistic method to reveal the actual impact of all your marketing levers

Understand the real impact of your campaigns beyond media indicators alone

Media, pricing, promotions, distribution… Your marketing results are the fruit of several levers interacting with one another. However, most analyses focus solely on media channels, ignoring key factors such as advertising pressure, price elasticity, or product availability.

Result: An incomplete interpretation of performance, which can lead to inefficient trade-offs.

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) offers a powerful alternative: a holistic approach, based on your historical data, allowing you to identify, measure, and steer the real impact of all your marketing levers.

In this article, you’ll find out why expanding your analysis beyond media transforms your capacity to allocate the right budgets, activate the right levers, and generate sustainable growth.

Why expand your measurement beyond media with MMM?

Being limited to measuring media investments only provides a partial view of marketing performance. To capture the real impact of your actions, it is essential to integrate all of your marketing levers—including those that are often underestimated, such as pricing, promotion, or distribution.

Expanding MMM’s scope of analysis allows you to:

• Develop a unified interpretation of performance: Integrate media, pricing, promotions, and merchandising into a single model for a 360° view of all your business levers.
• Optimize global marketing efficiency: Understand the precise contribution of each lever to allocate your budgets more intelligently.
• Identify hidden interactions: Certain synergies, such as a promotion that amplifies a digital campaign, can only be detected with an integrated model.
• Make informed decisions: A precise measurement of all the factors builds decision-makers’ trust and facilitates a data-driven strategy.

The key levers are often underestimated in your marketing analyses

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) goes far beyond the analysis of your media campaigns. It takes into account all the levers that influence your sales: promotions, pricing, and distribution, as well as contextual factors such as seasonality, competition, and external events.

Based on your historical data, MMM measures the actual effect of each lever while including their interactions. It provides a clear and exploitable view to manage your investments with precision, by reconciling immediate performance and long-term strategy.

Focus on 3 often under-exploited levers

1. Promotions: Incremental growth or loss of profit margin?

An in-store promotion can boost sales in the short term, but without an accurate measurement, it is difficult to know whether this is actual growth or simply a shift in sales, sometimes at the expense of a drop in profit margin. Understanding this impact is key to managing your promotional campaigns profitably.

2. Pricing and elasticity: The silent lever for accurate pricing

Price variations directly influence demand, but their effect depends on context and customer perception. Too steep an increase can slow down sales, while an ill-judged price cut can reduce perceived value. Measuring this elasticity accurately allows you to adjust your pricing strategy with confidence.

3. Distribution and stocks: Availability influences performance

The best marketing campaign will not yield the expected results if the product is out of stock or badly displayed in-store. However, these elements are rarely included in traditional analyses, which may result in a waste of marketing investments. Taking into account distribution and stocks is crucial to ensure optimal efficiency.

Reliable modeling requires an exhaustive view of the levers that influence performance. MMM is based on the ability to cross-reference media, promotional, pricing, distribution, and environmental data to reveal what has created—or curbed—growth.

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Concrete example: What MMM changes for brands

A leader in the mobility sector partnered with Ekimetrics to deploy a global marketing measurement programme with a clear objective: to understand the actual contribution of all the levers activated in the purchasing journey, not just the media campaigns. Thanks to a Marketing Mix model conducted on several countries and several key KPIs, the company was able to integrate data from branding and local activations, as well as structural elements such as marketing pressure and network coverage. Result: a 9 % increase in marketing effectiveness at a fixed budget, and a programme now expanded to 6 countries and 9 Business Units.

This example illustrates the value of an MMM extended to all influencing factors, including those which, like distribution or the product life cycle, are often ignored in traditional marketing analyses.

At the same time, a key player in smart home technology identified opportunities, via MMM, to re-allocate budget between short-term and long-term levers. The analysis of media halos, supplemented by real-time performance tracking via a dashboard, resulted in a 17 % increase in media ROI. Thanks to an optimization of the marketing calendar, the brand reduced the number of weeks on promotion by 64% without a negative impact on turnover. The projected ROI of the programme is estimated to be between 20 and 30 times the initial investment.

Refocusing marketing strategies on the levers that really add value

Measuring just your media investments only sheds light on part of the equation. Pricing, promotions, stock… These levers have a significant impact, which can be more conclusive than the best paid campaigns.

By integrating a holistic view via methods like MMM, you can regain control:

• By identifying the real drivers of growth
• By intelligently re-allocating your budgets
• By building a sustainable, data-driven strategy that is aligned with your business challenges

Want to know more about how to balance your investments between short-term performance and long-term brand equity Discover our comprehensive approach to Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) in our white paper: Conducting the Media Mix Orchestra to Build Brand Success.