Marketing Operations | July 7^th, 2017

Transforming Marketing Performance | McKinsey & Company, Inc. and 4tree GmbH

Dr. Lars Fiedler (VP and Solution General Manager Marketing Solution, McKinsey), Daniel Hagemeier (CTO, 4tree) and Dr. Kirsten Blacha (Engagement Manager, McKinsey)

The course Marketing Operations as part of the quantitative marketing module in the bachelor curriculum provides first insights into decision-making processes that a marketing manager has to face: How much budget do I need for planned marketing activities? How do I allocate my budget strategically and optimally? How are prices, products and advertisement linked with each other? Right after the last lecture covering the topic “Methods of Optimization”, the guest lecture “Transforming Marketing Performance” by McKinsey & Company and 4tree perfectly complemented the content with latest insights from practice.

Today, every marketing decision is influenced by a current phenomenon: digital transformation. Daniel Hagemeier, CTO of 4tree, a retail-analyze start-up from Münster, started the guest lecture with his presentation “Innovate or Die”. As nearly every second company considers the effect of digitization as strong, the importance of dealing with IT-tools and IT-optimization cannot be denied. Not only company IT but especially product IT becomes more and more an essential enabler of staying in the business and becoming successful. Daniel Hagemeier states that within this development, “the fast eat the slow, not the big the small.” Companies should be aware of IT playing a great role throughout the whole value chain and therefore throughout the whole customer experience.

Dr. Lars Fiedler from McKinsey continued and focused on the topic “Optimization of Marketing ROI” as most important issue of marketing executives. He started his presentation with a link to the marketing operations lecture: He regards quantitative marketing skills as very relevant in marketing practice, but notices how still just very few use these tools in daily business. This leads to many possibilities of reducing marketing spending without changing the outcome – or of raising sales without increasing the budget: According to his experience, costs can be easily cut by about 15-35 %. To achieve this aim, McKinsey has developed five steps toward successful Marketing ROI. During the guest lecture, Dr. Fiedler focused mainly on the two steps of how to develop a relevant message to the target group and on the importance of an effective instrument mix, which can be analyzed with the help of an econometric model.

Finally, Dr. Kirsten Blacha followed up on Dr. Fiedler with the possibility for the students to trial the McKinsey Marketing Navigator tool. This application has been invented to simulate possible optimization of Marketing ROI in times of increasing complexity of measuring and analyzing all relevant influencing factors. The guest lecture finished with honoring the winner of the marketing spending reallocation challenge and with many thanks for the interesting and insightful presentations by the practitioners.