With very specific need-based and seasonal consumer targets for its Zicam family of cold and allergy relief products, Matrixx Initiatives puts a portion of its media spend into buys made outside of the traditional big demographic television data blocks.
The company is assisted in this targeting effort by Simulmedia, along with sales and incidence data to close the loop on advertising spend and return on investment, says M’lou Walker, the company’s Chief Executive Officer.
“Simulmedia helps us to move away from the big blocks of demographic data and get down to who our actual buyers are likely to be,” Walker says. “What they look like, where they are.”
Because Matrixx products are purchased in-store as opposed to online, tying advertising exposure to actual sales results is difficult, Walker explains in an interview with Beet.TV during the annual PeopleFront event conducted by Simulmedia.
“We have used a decade’s worth of sales data and incidence data of about how people are suffering from coughs and colds,” Walker says.
The result is model created to try to demonstrate the link between the number of gross ratings points the company secures, the level of incidence and actual sales.
“We have a pretty tight model and use that retrospectively to explain what happened and prospectively to get a sense of ‘if we spend this much against this target we can expect to get this much in sales.’ It’s not perfect, but we really are able to explain a lot of our sales that way,” Walker says.
We interviewed her in New York at the Simulmedia PeopleFront conference where she was a speaker. Please find more video interviews from the PeopleFront event right here.
