The Challenge
The client, a UK home insurance provider, had a mature marketing mix model refreshed on a regular cadence, and its short-term readings gave little cause for concern. Campaign ROAS held steady, promotional periods performed to plan, and every channel review ended with numbers the team could defend.
Beneath those readings, the baseline had been declining steadily across two consecutive years while acquisition targets grew harder to hit with the same budgets. With media campaigns performing as expected, this erosion remained entirely invisible to standard channel reporting, manifesting instead as an unexplained gap between marketing effort and commercial outcome.
The brief was to establish isolate the drivers of baseline drain by connecting the model to the extensive brand tracker data collected over the same period.
The Solution
Linking the tracked brand metrics and historical advertising spend directly into the moving MMM baseline’s movement isolated the precise drivers of this long-term structural erosion.
Price perception and trust emerged as the key measures dragging the base down, with both scores weakening across the same two years the baseline had been eroding. Traditional top-of-funnel indicators like awareness, consideration, and advertising recall remained stable throughout, ruling them out as contributors to the erosion.
Further causal analysis traced the downward trend in trust and price perceptions to renewal pricing, with long-standing customers meeting steep premium increases at renewal, and the frustration showed up first in the tracker and in the base itself with a lag.
The Impact
These insights moved the strategic response beyond the marketing department, leading to a joint review of renewal pricing practices with the commercial team and a total refocusing of brand communications around rebuilding trust and value for money. This dual approach successfully flattened baseline decline over the following year, while trust scores were elevated to a core business KPI reviewed quarterly alongside the MMM refresh.
By exposing a critical commercial issue that standard performance reporting had completely missed, the project definitively proved the strategic value of the brand tracking framework, permanently shielding its budget from historical challenges during annual planning cycles.
Key Takeaways
- The Erosion Beneath Healthy Campaigns – Short-term reporting showed nothing wrong while the base eroded for two years underneath it.
- Metrics That Explained the Decline – Trust and price perception tracked the baseline’s fall, while awareness and recall held steady and were ruled out.
- A Cause Beyond Marketing – Renewal pricing practice drove the falling scores, moving the response beyond communications alone.
- An Early Warning in Place – Tracker scores now carry escalation paths reviewed quarterly alongside the MMM.
Tools and Techniques
- Brand equity evaluation
- Structural Equation Modelling – analysing directional paths on the isolated MMM baseline
- Time series causality testing – evaluating lead-lag relationships between corporate pricing shifts and brand degradation
- Baseline decomposition – isolating short-term incremental media spikes from long-term brand equity trends
- Data Integration – blending historical brand tracker records, renewal pricing indexes, and media spend timelines
- R – data handling and time-series statistical modelling
- Power BI - reporting
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