Product Overview

Media attribution is a critical issue for marketers. Digital media provides marketers access to fine-grained data about consumer interactions with brands, but identifying the contribution of different media channels to the acquisition and retention of customers is very challenging. Marketers use attribution modeling to identify the value of each media channel. This allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle, and to understand its role in the revenues that ultimately result. This simulation models media attribution, choice of campaigns, and allocation of resources across different media for the chosen campaigns. The student in the simulation is expected to play the role of the chief marketing officer for an exercise fitness app, ExerciseMinder, using an analytics dashboard to track investments in the different media, subsequent acquisitions, and retention rate each month. The goal of the simulation is to grow the firm’s subscription base and maintain a healthy return on marketing investment (ROMI). The students’ objective is to increase the installed base by 200% and maintain ROMI at 3.0 or higher. The simulation provides students with a chance to work with descriptive analytics (in the performance dashboard), predictive analytics (in the details tab), and prescriptive analytics (in the A/B testing tab). This allows students to combine analytics with fundamental marketing principles like customer acquisition and retention, copy testing, and integrated marketing communications.

Learning Objectives

1. Illustrate that obtaining insights about customer and prospect behavior using data will help marketers develop better marketing plans that are effective in the long term. 2. Show that analytics needs to be combined with experiments to produce effective resource allocation strategies. 3. Emphasize that marketing media channels have a synergistic effect on customers and that marketing managers should not treat them as independent channels without any interdependence. 4. Illustrate the value of managing both acquisition and retention for a subscription business. 5. Illustrate the value of retention for determining customer lifetime value and the long-term value of a business. 6. Show that campaigns have an acquisition or a retention objective and need to be effectively placed in the right channel to achieve their goal.