Share these talks and lectures with your colleagues
Invite colleaguesCase study
Quantifying the importance, contribution and efficiency of Cotton Inc.’s paid, owned and earned media through customer journey modelling
Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing,
6
(4),
294-311
(2019)
Abstract
As brand managers and marketing professionals struggle to optimise marketing spend in a post-digital world, many are using the prominent paid, owned and earned (PEO) media model to plan and execute marketing communications. However, when it comes to quantifying the contribution and efficiency of PEO media on business outcomes (such as revenues), marketing professionals struggle to quantify the effects of owned and earned media, which often have low or no direct effect on revenues because they are typically created to have an intermediate or long-term effect on brand attitudes. While marketers quantify paid media effects on revenues using either market response models, which are econometric models, or attribution models, it is not permitted to measure intermediate effects with these methods. Using Cotton Incorporated as a case study, this paper presents a customer journey model, or integrated approach, with brand attachment as a proxy for the intermediate effect. The resulting model is an objective approach to link POE media to demand and describe contribution and efficiency in terms of both revenue and brand attachment. This approach enabled data-driven insights that were used to evaluate and optimise Cotton Incorporated’s entire POE marketing communications efforts more accurately than traditional methods.
Keywords: content marketing; customer journey modelling; earned media; integrated marketing
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Joann Sciarrino is the Isabella Cunningham Endowed Chair in Advertising and Director of the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations in the Moody College at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to working in academia, she was Executive Vice President for BBDO North America, where she led a successful team that provided research, analytics and modelling solutions for more than 30 global clients, most notably AT&T, Starbucks and Hyatt.
Jim Friedman is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Marketing Attribution Partners, a software-based, analytic company providing customer-journey based, unified marketing measurement solutions to marketers. Previously, Jim was co-founder and Executive Vice President of Marketing Management Analytics, often considered the research firm responsible for commercialising marketing mix modelling.
Todd Kirk is a co-founder of Marketing Attribution Partners. Todd has also held senior roles at leading research firms, consultant agencies and other startups, empowering marketing teams through analytics at organisations like AT&T, Citi, Diageo, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble.
Kim S. Kitchings is Senior Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Cotton Incorporated. She oversees the company’s digital marketing, social media, television, strategic partnerships and global market communications to convey messages about Cotton to various constituents with the aim of motivating consumers and the trade to buy items made of cotton. Kim has a bachelor of arts in business from North Carolina State University and master’s degree in business administration from Meredith College.
John Prudente is Research Associate at University of Texas at Austin in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. He has over a dozen years’ experience managing online marketing campaigns and departments at both mid-market companies and non-profit organisations. He holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
