How can marketing performance be measured in our increasingly sophisticated digital age? Oliver Gediehn (Expert Associate Partner) and Peter Saffert (Expert) from McKinsey & Company visited the Marketing Center Muenster to provide an answer on this question. On June 21, 2019, they gave a guest lecture in the Marketing Operations course, led by Dr. Gerrit Cziehso.

In order to provide a common understanding, they started by introducing the students to the currently most common ways of measuring the marketing return on investment: A/B-testing, pragmatic heuristics, customer surveys, marketing mix modeling and multi-touch-attribution. However, Oliver Gediehn and Peter Saffert stated that the conventional use of these methods is not appropriate anymore when it comes to the challenges of the digital age. In the future, we will have to move from an optimization based on aggregate data sets to person-level data sets. Consequently, the question should rather be: Who is sitting in front of the TV?

When searching for answers for such questions, the problem lies usually in a lack of data and not a lack of analytics. Thus, the main challenge for marketing experts is to find data for every single interaction with the customer, online as well as offline. Therefore, the tracking of mobile phones, which delivers an incredible amount of information, can be one possibility to conquer this problem. As the world’s largest management consultancy, McKinsey & Company tries to implement such forward-looking ways of measuring marketing performance. To do so, the company expanded by founding several new divisions such as McKinsey Digital, advanced analytics or marketing & sales ventures. In this context, McKinsey & Company also acquired the data analytics startup 4tree, which was founded and is still located in Muenster. It has been integrated in McKinsey’s platform Periscope. Our guests concluded their lecture by thoroughly answering student questions and introducing McKinsey’s marketing & sales fellow program. We thank Oliver Gediehn and Peter Saffert for their insightful guest lecture.