By Bill Harvey and Rick Bruner
Nothing like this year has ever happened before. So many companies are down double digits in 2020 YOY revenues that CEOs must rapidly do something different or risk termination.
Doing something different has not been Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for a long time.
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) turned out to be the essential for C Suites over the past three decades in rationalizing their marketing decisions. MMM is not conducive to doing anything rapidly, nor differently. "Bayesian Priors" is a fancy name many marketing modelers use to mean "last year's MMM results", meaning that new MMM analyses are anchored to year-ago MMMs. MMM is a methodology that encourages tweaking around the edges rather than doing anything differently.
Which is not to say discard MMM. However, it is not going to be very useful right now in the crisis we are in. All of the slowly accumulated benchmarks and baselines are out the window. The 104-week gestation period is inimical to companies' survival.
Are we being dramatic? Obviously not, based on a quick study of what Coca-Cola is doing. A complete reorganization globally, 200 brands on the chopping block, the 200 brands being kept reorganized into a new reporting structure designed to "bring marketing closer to the consumer" with a new emphasis on innovation.
The NY Times quotes Coke's CEO, James Quincey, saying the company is "reassessing our overall marketing return on investment on everything from ad viewership across traditional media to improving effectiveness in digital."