Quest for the Grail: Measuring the Incremental Influence of Promotions in a Digital Big Data World

Despite the prevalence and variety of attribution methods, there are no strong substitutes for controlled experiments when trying to measure the causal impact of promotional marketing on customer retention and spend. However, marketing in the digital age has become so complex that experimentation is usually unwieldy or inconclusive, specifically when marketing many products and brands to a broad cross-section of customers. The author expands on the promotional design and test-n-learn framework developed by IHG to measure the individual effects of multiple promotions on multiple forms of customer engagement. The paper summarizes the key managerial implications by providing a start-stop-continue recommendation for marketing practitioners.