The power of data to transform digital marketing

Case study | Automotive

Achieving significant gains through a bespoke marketing mix model

We partnered with Volvo and global media agency Mindshare to create a bespoke Marketing Mix Model (MMM) and capture the unique journey of customers, deriving actionable insights that would lead to more effective customer engagement and marketing spend.

Background

Volvo wanted to understand the complex path from discovery to the purchase of their cars. Customer data resided at the car dealers. So, how could we help them harness their first-party data to better understand the customer journey and optimize their media investments?

Key solutions

  • Audience, Attribution & Advanced Analytics
  • MMM

Ambition

Our ambition was to capture the unique journey of Volvo customers, so we provided both the methodologies and the technology to connect their first-party data points and better engage customers, ultimately improving the cost-effectiveness of their marketing.

Solution

For seven of Volvo’s top passenger cars, we:

  • Identified all digital media touchpoints of their consumer journeys
  • Analyzed the campaign data per advertising creative, ad formats, and customer targets
  • Built a customized marketing mix model (MMM)
  • Fused the MMM learnings with other efficiency measurements such as brand lift
  • Analyzed the effectiveness of all of Volvo’s ad campaigns, providing a data comparison with Volvo’s existing digital attribution models
  • Recommended marketing spend reallocations to increase performance
“We went with a customized approach as part of which we, in addition to standard MMM, designed a deep dive analysis. We first measured the long-term effects, because that’s so important in the automotive category. This allowed us to quantify the value of having a strong brand.”

– Lisa Gröning, Head of Data Science Sweden, Acceleration

Results

The Marketing Mix Application to Volvo’s budget has resulted in substantial changes to spend allocations and an optimized media budget performance.

10%

increase in revenue potential

10-14%

increase in brand equity potential

This project was also shortlisted for the WPP Extraordinary Awards and published on Think with Google

“I would say the biggest change to come from this is that we’re trusting data and using it on a cross-functional basis. It’s not only the marketing department that benefits from this data, it also helps the finance department, as well as the CEO and the management team. Everyone can use this data as a basis for their work.”

– Per Carleö, Marketing Director, Volvo Cars

Technology used

Learn more

Andreas Nordfors

Executive Director, Tech Solutions
andreas.nordfors@acceleration.biz
+46 73 66 38 100