Data-driven approach gives Buster the extra bounce

Buster the boxer may already be an online sensation – with even parodies featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton emerging within hours of last week’s launch – but this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad was not just a case of devising a cute TV spot and hoping for the best; from the outset it has been driven by advanced marketing analytics.
While John Lewis has always understood the power of the creative story, it wanted to improve its understanding of the impact its campaigns had on the brand and customer behaviour, in addition to external factors, such as competitor activity.
John Lewis customer director Chris Bates explained: “We wanted to understand which of our various marketing efforts were effective sales drivers. By getting a better idea of how effective our campaigns have been, we could then start to understand how they affected our brand, our sales in store and online.”
He continued: “We realised we needed a solution that could help us deliver more compelling campaigns to our customers.”
However, the retailer was not simply looking for a service that could generate statistics. It wanted to form a long term partnership with a firm which could ensure it received the best possible insight into its different sales channels.
After considering various solutions, John Lewis found that advanced marketing analytics firm Neustar MarketShare was the most suitable company to offer a holistic solution and advise it on how various marketing activities interacted alongside its different product categories. This would allow John Lewis to adjust its marketing spend to help maximise marketing ROI.
Neustar Marketshare claims to be a leader in sophisticated analytics and attribution, utilising sales, macroeconomic, and customer data, to quantify the sales impact for marketing spend. Having initially engaged Neustar MarketShare to support its marketing efficiency efforts and help gain insights into its customers’ journeys, John Lewis soon realised it could extract even further value from the solution.
Bates added: “We started by using the solution to analyse the impact of our campaigns during major calendar events such as Black Friday, but the Neustar Marketshare team highlighted that we could further develop a complete and more robust view of other internal and external influences such as competitor activity, the economy and the weather.”
As part of the roll out, John Lewis decided to utilise Marketshare Strategy, an application designed to enable it to continuously allocate resources and optimise its marketing spend without requiring additional investments in analytics or ad-hoc consultancy.
The Neustar MarketShare service has enabled the marketing teams at John Lewis to successfully test out budget scenarios, better plan ahead for immediate tactical challenges in order to understand to understand and optimise its range of marketing investments in today’s complex omni-channel environment.
The company is now able to underscore its campaigns, particularly its TV ads, with deep analytics which have revealed revenue of up to £8 for every marketing pound spent. The partnership has also enabled John Lewis to understand the level to which marketing is a key driver for revenue, having contributed 24% of sales in 2014 alone. Through these detailed insights John Lewis can see the value of its marketing investment and grow its sales revenue.
Bates concluded: “From the beginning, Neustar MarketShare has invested in John Lewis to not only help us optimise our marketing spend, but also enhance data-driven decision making within the company. Thanks to this partnership, we can now see how customers are interacting with the John Lewis brand, from using the website as a research tool to the power of omni-channel campaigns on our different categories and customer segments.”