It’s budgeting time at Zoom Running, and Marketing VP Chris Brown wants to recalibrate where he’s spending his designated marketing dollars. His challenge is channel overlap and attribution. He’s considering reassigning how much he allots to catalogs, email, and search—all of which drive online sales—but the purchase drivers aren’t clear enough to properly allocate the new budget based on past customer behaviors. Additionally, the overlapping way Brown and his team coordinate multichannel campaigns makes it difficult to know with certainty which touch actually prompts purchases—or whether it’s a combination of coordinated touches that drives sales.
Another issue making his task more difficult is the effectiveness of Zoom’s social sharing strategy. Brown wonders if he should simply allot more to social, even though, in some cases, email and mobile are the channels actually spurring activity there.
More testing would help him decide, but there’s little time—his budget for the next fiscal year is due in a week. Brown decides to contact his mentor for some advice on how best to determine what budget to allocate where.
