A global retailer had taken the business decision to prioritise the harnessing of data for customer relationship benefit. The brand therefore has a global aspiration to become a data-driven business. They wanted to use data to make business decisions in a more quantitative, substantial and robust manner.

They recognised that different region and market units were at differing levels of data-driven maturity, so wanted to develop a proof-of-concept means to promote data-driven customer marketing initiatives in one market, enabling a global framework rollout.

Using the Swiss market as a proof of concept test, and working in close collaboration with Swiss marketing leads, Merkle was engaged to deliver our proprietary Cognition Estimation and Prioritisation process to respond to the challenges the retailer was facing.

The elements of our Cognition process can be bespoken to answer a particular client’s needs. For this client, we firstly established of a KPI tree to map the organisation’s marketing activities, objectives and metrics. We then took the tree forward to produce a Value Estimator Framework (VEF), a scenario planning model which includes both Client Actual Master and Subset business metrics, and also quantitative Predictive measures of marketing change. Then we ideated a number of marketing activity scenarios, which we then put into a planning brief and ran through the VEF model, including all metrics (revenue returns, secondary benefits, stakeholders etc.).

The first KPI tree was a sizing and prioritisation exercise, the VEF builds out potential returns based on substantive client Actuals metrics, and the Scenario Builder generates a series of described, validated activities accompanied by these gain estimates.