Case Studies

Optimizing Marketing Spend Effectiveness

Chick-fil-A is a fast food chain with over $2 billion in sales and a major presence in the southeast. Chick-fil-A runs a wide gamut of marketing/advertising campaigns at a national and local level (e.g., TV, radio, out-of-home, sports sponsorships, discounts & giveaways, community outreach events, sampling).

Challenges

Chick-fil-A wanted to understand the impact of each marketing/advertising medium on product sales (by unit type, product type, geographical location and season) to better allocate their marketing spend in the future for optimum impact on sales

Approach

Collected, cleansed and loaded into our database 300 million rows of data on daily Chick-fil-A sales by product (item) and location for the previous 5 years. Also loaded data on every single marketing campaign that was run (TRP’s) Ran the data through our proprietary spend effectiveness data to measure and isolate the effect of each marketing and non-marketing driver (e.g., type of location, macroeconomic conditions, season, time of year, operator type, etc) on product sales Determine SIR (sales to investment ratio) for every marketing/advertising medium

Results

Determined the impact (lift) of every dollar spent on marketing & advertising (by medium) on product sales Quantified the impact of seasonality, macroeconomic conditions, type of store, customer service, weather, etc on product sales Recommended changes to the 2008 campaign to optimize marketing spend effectiveness

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