SAS® Marketing Mix Advisor maximizes results through optimization

CARY, NC - SAS® Marketing Mix Advisor can help marketers faced with countless choices among media and marketing channels to determine the right investment mix to reach consumers. The new solution maximizes results by frequently analyzing, predicting and optimizing the mix of advertising and promotions.

Designed for business users, SAS Marketing Mix Advisor improves planning and forecasting by helping marketers calculate the effects of marketing tactics across business units, brands, geographies and channels. Available as a hosted solution, SAS Marketing Mix Advisor consolidates all media and promotions analysis in one, easy-to-access location. Prebuilt reports allow for performance assessment across an organization’s media mix, including traditional advertisements, online media and emerging channels of communication. Marketers can take advantage of the embedded marketing analytics to identify optimal scenarios for future marketing efforts.

“Understanding how to best allocate marketing resources is one of the biggest challenges for organizations today,” said Kimberly Collins, Managing Vice President, CRM, at Gartner Research. “This makes marketing mix optimization a key ingredient in marketing resource management (MRM). Companies that can figure out the optimal allocation of their marketing mix – and how to do it more frequently and accurately – will be a step ahead in an increasingly complex economic and marketing environment.”

By simplifying interactions with marketing mix data and models, SAS Marketing Mix Advisor helps marketers to more frequently capture insight to:

* Drive business results through better planning and execution of marketing activities.
* Identify opportunities to increase profit through improved ROI on existing investments in marketing and research projects.
* Improve collaboration and consistency of analysis across business units, brands, categories and geographies.

Improve forecast accuracy

SAS Marketing Mix Advisor enables marketers to frequently analyze business results and provide guidance to internal and external stakeholders. This is achieved by storing data from marketing mix models in a dynamic form that generates dashboards and Web reports as data updates occur. The result is timely and relevant data that assists in decision making.
Deploy marketing resources effectively, efficiently

Using SAS Marketing Mix Advisor, marketers can easily calculate the effects of specific tactics across business units, product lines, geographies, channels and time horizons. By more frequently predicting marketing campaign performance at different levels, organizations can identify opportunities to lower expenses while minimizing impact to revenue and profit goals.
Improve competitive advantage

Users can consolidate results from multiple marketing mix models, regardless of source. SAS Marketing Mix Advisor intelligently stores results created internally through agency relationships. This helps marketers make decisions across business units and product categories while leveraging existing investments in data and models.
Embedded analytics

SAS software’s powerful analytics easily simulate the effects of implementing new plans and identify where to allocate investments for the optimal marketing mix. As market shifts occur, marketers and their internal/external partners need to agree on a course of action. Scenario planning with SAS supports this consensus while enabling visual sensitivity analysis across all dimensions.
Easy to use

SAS Marketing Mix Advisor’s intuitive Web interface caters specifically to marketers. All media and promotions display in one, easy-to-access location, with prebuilt reports delivering summary and detailed results, including decomposition, “due to” and diminishing returns analysis. Up-to-date results from libraries of marketing mix models help uncover historical brand drivers as well as implications of future marketing plan changes. Financial analysts can review return on marketing investments (ROMI) based on outlays across business units, product lines, geography and time.
Marketing scorecards and strategy maps

SAS Marketing Mix Advisor is part of the broader set of capabilities of SAS for Marketing Performance Management, which enables companies to associate advertising and promotion performance with strategic and financial metrics. Marketers can track KPIs, such as sales and marketing expenses, across geography levels and analyze trends. Marketing mix is optimized by ensuring alignment with other parts of the organization, including finance, operations and other marketing functions.
Integration with SAS® Customer Intelligence

SAS Marketing Mix Advisor integrates with the enterprise marketing management suite SAS Customer Intelligence. Capabilities include inbound and outbound campaign management, Web analytics and customer contact policy optimization. Organizations can leverage cross-channel and media effects by incorporating media activity into direct marketing communications plans.
World-class, advanced analytics

The SAS Advanced Analytics Lab, SAS’ premier advanced analytic consulting group, develops innovative processes and techniques using SAS software to solve complex business problems for customers. More importantly, the team helps customers develop in-house analytical skills and deploy leading systems and processes to guide decision making.

SAS’ comprehensive suite of top-ranked enterprise marketing management solutions spans the entire customer-focused marketing process, including campaign management, cross-sell/up-sell, customer experience analytics, customer retention, customer segmentation, e-mail marketing, event-driven marketing, campaign optimization, marketing mix analysis, marketing performance management, real-time decision management and Web analytics.

SAS Customer Intelligence solutions enable companies to deepen customer insights, choreograph customer interactions and continuously improve the organization’s marketing performance. Customers worldwide using SAS to support customer initiatives include 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, DeutschlandCard, The Dow Chemical Co., First Citizens Bank, Grupo Santander, Swisscom, US Bank, Vodafone Australia and Wolters Kluwer.

About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know® .