It was a great pleasure talking to you all and very inspiring to see 💡  that our topic really matters to a lot of people.

So I wanted to provide everyone 💁‍♂️ with some brief summary and some additional material so that you can start your very own return on invest journey and finally understand what drives your very own marketing performance.

First and foremost, don't worry! Even though things may at the beginning look a bit wicked, this is less about statistics and mathematics than about clear and rational thinking!

Second: Don't listen to anyone but your own curiosity! There is a lot of hype out there that will tell you which numbers or methods are key. Some people will even tell you that it is simply impossible to measure ad impact and that advertising might now even show any impact at all (like Dr. Fou points out here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/). Others will try to sell you their very own approach or tool. Both sides will likely try to fool you.

So don't get fooled and try to be a good German by following Kant's definition of enlightment and try to excerpt from your self-inflicted immaturity instead!

Marketing research has spend a lot of time and energy to measure advertising lift. There is a sophisticated palette of tools and techniques available to quantify the impact of advertising and other marketing activities. I will post some articles, which I personally find to be inspiring below. Most of them are open access, for some of them you will need to get access through a university library. 

While you read through these sources, keep some basic rules in mind!

First rule of the marketing RoI Club (no I don't mean you should not talk about the club):

0️⃣1️⃣ Don’t be fooled by numbers! Don't run for high conversions or clicks. Don't focus on the things that happen on the way. But focus on the outcome. In many cases in marketing this may be sales. In other settings this may be polls (politics) or share price (finance). Once you understand what to focus on, you will also understand at which other variables you want to look at, when trying  to understand what drives your performance variable of interest and how these things work together!

0️⃣2️⃣ Don't take it easy! Only because some ads show magnificent numbers or your numbers seem to tell you that one thing drives them all, it doesn't need to be so. Last click attribution is often confused as a performance measurement tool. But it isn't! In fact last click attribution is like blaming your last drink the night before for your headache. We are living in a complex world. Things interact. And you certainly had a drink or two before, which may similarly explain your current state of affair. The trick is to understand how things worked together, and how much the first prosecco  made you stay at the bar and have another drink. And how this again affected your decisions to move to shots an hour later. Once you understand the dynamics across a consumers decision process and how these things work together over time you will be able to really quantify the individual impact of each drink you had. Or all the ads you booked!

0️⃣3️⃣ Remember again, about what we talked. Once you have your performance variable, identify performance drivers. These will point you on the performance indicators, using analytics and models, you will be able to identify lead performance indicators and comparing impact numbers you will finally be able to identify your personal Key Performance Indicators. And again, don't trust other people who claim to have found the one and all KPI. Remember, some people like Tequila. Others Rum. And some even like Whiskey. At the end of the day, it is about your individual model. 

0️⃣4️⃣ Once you have your KPIs, try to understand what is driving them. This means you can move forward, by becoming more granular with your analysis. You know that number of comments matter from your model when it comes to polls? So the next question is then, what drives commenting behaviour. Add the necessary information to your model. Code each post into topics. Use text mining tools to understand how emotions influence comments. Continue to climb down the ladder. You will soon learn that this game never ends. It only makes you smarter!

0️⃣5️⃣ Keep being critical and curious. Models are only one part of the equation. Experiments are the other. You believe you identified something? Try it out. Use some posts to play with the identified drivers and see if your idea is working. If not, go back to step 4 and see what other factors may cause your variable of interest. 

I know at the beginning this all feels overwhelming and complicated 🙈. At the end you will realize that this isn't rocket science 🚀. Still you will see that once you dive into this world, the sky is the limit 🛰🛸! To begin your journey, I recommend to start having a look at the attached readings. If you are not scared by greek symbols and math, start with the journal articles. If you prefer more verbal explanations and feel that you would like to first understand the logic behind it, start with Koen Pauwel's book (the third reference). He walks you gently through each topic and helps you to develop your very own marketing return on invest model. At the end you will even be able to develop your very own dashboard to monitor and track your KPIs. 

• De Haan, E., Wiesel, T., & Pauwels, K. (2016). The effectiveness of different forms of online advertising for purchase conversion in a multiple-channel attribution framework. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 33(3), 491-507.
• Peters, K., Chen, Y., Kaplan, A. M., Ognibeni, B., & Pauwels, K. (2013). Social media metrics—A framework and guidelines for managing social media. Journal of interactive marketing, 27(4), 281-298.
• Pauwels, K. (2014). It's Not the Size of the Data--it's how You Use it: Smarter Marketing with Analytics and Dashboards. Amacom

I hope you enjoyed this very brief intro. If you like to know more, just drop us a mail and join us for our next clubhouse talk next week!

In response to the positive feedback for their guest talk last year, Grabarz & Partner again followed the invitation by Professor Kübler and joined the lecture „Integrated Marketing Communications” on July 6, 2020. During their 90-minute presentation, Reinhard Patzschke, CEO Consulting at Grabarz & Partner, and Bastian Goldschmidt, Head of Strategy, showed how they convert social trends into successful advertising campaigns. Grabarz & Partner belongs to one of the most successful German advertising agencies and has just been awarded as one of the „Top Ten Creative Agencies of the Decade”. They are working together with companies such as Porsche, Volkswagen, Fielmann or IKEA. 

In their presentation, the two advertising specialists argued that in today’s so-called “second era of enlightenment” advertising agencies do not only have a responsibility for brands, but also for society. Thus, they underlined the importance of empathy which helps them to develop campaigns which meet the current zeitgeist and to eventually cut through the advertising clutter. When planning new communication concepts, the company checks whether advertising and information campaigns are positively or negatively affected by these topics or if they lead to new communication potentials. To better illustrate their statements, both speakers brought along a collection of carefully selected trends currently affecting society which they summarized in five different statements including Shit is getting personal, Let’s talk about sex or Let’s get stoned. A little.

As the students of the “Integrated Marketing Communications” class are to develop an integrated communication campaign for different Münster-based businesses which face challenging times due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the presentation has been followed by a vivid discussion. Students had the possibility to exchange first ideas regarding their campaigns and to discuss how their project cases relate to the different trends presented. 

Despite this year’s presentation could only take place in a virtual environment, one could sense the great passion Grabarz & Partner puts into its work. Also, the camera in front of which Reinhard Patzschke and Bastian Goldschmidt presented, allowed for insights into the premises of the advertising agency and gave an idea of the pleasant working atmosphere which otherwise would have remained hidden. 

All in all, students were very enthusiastic about the talk as it picked up the theoretical elements from the lecture and transferred them into a practical context. Hence, it not only helped the students to better understand the different lecture contents, but also underlined the high relevance of marketing education in Münster. 

On November 28^th 2019, a group of MCM marketing students secured a remarkable third place in the talents category of the prestigious Neptun Cross Media Award in Hamburg. The students had to develop an advertising campaign for the Münster lemonade brand liba as a final project for this summer’s “Integrated Marketing Communications” (IMC) class hold by MCM professor Raoul Kübler.

The project turned out to that exciting that the instructor decided to submit the campaign to the international advertising show “Neptun” that awards best multi-channel campaigns each year. With good reason: even though the talents section featured more than 18 excellent international submissions, the Münster students secured at the end a prestigious 3^rd place.

“The efforts and performance of our team can not be judged high enough,” explains Professor Kübler. “The first two places in this year’s award went to submissions from the Miami Ad School. We were the only classic business school in this year’s award. All other submissions were similarly based on outstanding creative ideas. However, the jury was especially delighted by the analytical work of our students and how the team translated these research insights into a convincing and creative cross-media campaign that integrated the key message in multiple, different media channels”.

The campaign "liba for your city" focuses – based on the extensive marketing research and field studies conducted by the MCM students – on a rather unconvential expansion strategy that targets cities like Essen, Krefeld, Bonn and Wuppertal instead of major metropolises such as Hamburg or Düsseldorf by appealing to local pride and regionalism. Funny headlines such as “Better from the Kiosk than from big enterprises”, “Better Ruhr than Rimini” or “Better Burg Linn than Berghain” help the students to catch interest and awareness. Relying on regionalism the campaign further fosters curiosity and drives test-sales for an alternative and sustainable lemonade.

Also liba founder and manager Benjamin Heeke is delighted: “We congratulate the student’s team for their big success. We were also fascinated by the many ideas developed by the other teams for our brand during the IMC class. We will now directly contact all students and discuss how we can use the many ideas to better promote our product”.

Defne Deneri, Jessy Hauser, Niklas Westernberger, Felix Gößling, and Kevin Goy Ramos also conclude that the many efforts taken for the project were worth it: “It is great to see that all the different theoretical insights and concepts which we encountered during the IMC class were truly helpful to develop a power- and successful campaign, that did not only convince the liba management, but also delighted the leading experts of the international award jury.”

You also can watch a short campaign video here:

Together with colleagues Michael Langmaack and Sönke Albers from Kühne Logistics University and MCM VIP and UT Austin Professor Wayne Hoyer, Raoul Kübler managed to publish a research article in the prestigious Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (ranked as A by Journal) that demonstrates that value-crises such as child labor, environmental pollution or tax evasion tremendously decrease consumers’ price and product performance sensitivities.

“This finding makes value-crises very much different from other forms of corporate crises such as performance-related crises like product-recalls, where previous research showed that consumers become more price-sensitive,” explains Professor Kübler. The study relies on 8 different choice-experiments, which all consistently find a tremendous reduction of price sensitivity as well as the product performance sensitivity for the value-violating company independent from the type of violation, the violation strength, and the product category. The international research team suspects that moral outrage triggers this reaction, as they also find with the help of a text mining study relying on more than 300,000 user comments from Facebook that value-crises cause significantly more moral outrage than comparable performance crises.

“The interesting thing is, that the decrease of the price and performance sensitivities is not only true for the violator but also for the non-violating other market participants” Professor Kübler further explains. This spill-over effect however does not come from consumers who are suspecting similar companies to behave similarly unethical, but from the fact that consumers pay less attention to price and product performance than to ethical compliance. The study shows that consumer who are trying to avoid the violating product, will be more likely to accept higher prices and or lower product performance levels from non-violating competitors.

The empirical finding brings important implications for managers responsible to secure a company’s future after a value-crisis. Until know a lot of managers believed that sales can be re-stimulated post crisis similar to a product-harm crisis by lowering prices or offering better service or more product performance. Our research however points out that this is the wrong way. Instead of investing in price campaigns, company should do their best to regain faith into the company’s morality before further engaging in any marketing activities.

The publication can be downloaded here.