June 2010 – This paper defines marketing mix modeling, shares approaches for incorporating public relations results into the model – primarily through media content analysis – and provides a recent case study. The featured case study confirms what PR professionals believe to be true: PR is a most powerful marketing agent. What is more, public relations consistently surpasses the return-on-investment and relative selling power of other MARCOM activities within the marketing mix, including those which command much larger budgets.
Today’s marketers, with the benefit of advanced mathematical methods along with new technologies for data-collection, data-warehousing and data-mining, are unraveling marketing’s mysteries to answer fundamental questions about business performance and sales. In this paper, the authors put marketing mix modeling into the broader framework of public relations practice. First, they recognize that media relations is one aspect of the professional scope of public relations. References to “public relations” refer to “media-centric public relations.” Second, while public relations often resides within marketing organizations, the authors acknowledge that public relations serves many purposes beyond marketing. Third, while the paper seeks to explore how marketing public relations activities drive sales specifically, the modeling techniques presented here apply just as well to other business outcomes.
While marketing mix modeling has become more common and more reliable in the past decade, relatively few cases integrate public relations. Among those few cases which do integrate public relations results, even fewer are available for public dissemination. This paper shares a case study that reveals both the company and the brand.
PDF: Isolating the Effects of Media-Based Public Relations on Sales
Optimization through Marketing Mix Modeling
Mark Weiner, CEO, Prime Research North America, Liney Arnorsdottir, Research Associate, Ketchum, Rainer Lang, Director of Research, Ketchum Pleon, Brian G. Smith, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Houston
June 2010
