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Ensuring the Understanding of Transferred Demand

Symphony Retail has offered an on-demand webinar for a few months that provides their point of view on why better assortment planning is more important in 2021 and beyond.  Like many current thought-starters in the industry, this was...

Revisiting How Brands Grow … Our Part Two

All the best for 2021 everyone! Before the holidays, we outlined the importance of How Brands Grow, What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp as an evidence-based user manual for marketers with a very key central theme. To achieve sustainable...

Revisiting How Brands Grow … Our Part One

The first part of How Brands Grow, What Marketers Don’t Know was a business bestseller by Byron Sharp that took the marketing world by storm a decade ago. Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute used evidence-based research...

Getting to Know Bayesian

As "new blood" enters the workforce, I am pleased to see the technical skills at the client growing again as well as the desire to understand the more technical concepts behind our approach to shopper response analytics. In the last couple of...

Pricing Done Right in a Recession

Incrementality is easily overlooked during a period of economic expansion. We would argue that doing so is bad business when environmental conditions are good. Further, failing to understand the contribution of incrementality versus...

Cross-Sectional Variation … More Important than Ever

I try not to let the blog turn into a sales pitch. But during a recent discussion on how to encourage clients to invest in Middlegame  services during COVID-19—or once we finally emerge from the pandemic—my business partner...

Why the Name Middlegame?

All of us have been through a series of rough months so restarting the blog little less serious than usual has been on my mind.  We haven’t been asked about the name of the brand for years, but it came up twice in recent client...

Marketing Metrics Across the Globe

We often refer the book Marketing Metrics: The Manager's Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance. I sent a used copy to a client after highlighting several of the Chapter Seven elements on pricing. The book is easily the best source for...

Category Definition

We built the Competitive Interaction Analysis (CIA)® platform to work with any combination of geographies, time periods, and products. However, this flexibility has often haunted us when we freely offer to utilize any combination of...

The Flaw of Averages

Sam Savage coined the phrase "the flaw of averages.”  I date myself too often in this blog, but I was lucky to discover Sam in 1992 when I was fortunate to attend one of his "Quantitative Management Tools for...

Agility at Scale

We recently found another wonderful article that the McKinsey team, specializing in FMCG, put together. "Agility@Scale: Solving the growth challenge in consumer packaged goods" defines how to overcome the uphill battle many FMCG categories...

Attribute-Based Forecasting

During the last decade, a significant amount of attention has been paid to "Attribute-Based Forecasting" in the demand planning community. The idea originated because new product launches with limited history still require forecasts in...

Middlegame Hero: Robert Blattberg

In 1990, Robert Blattberg published Sales Promotion Concepts, Methods, and Strategies with Scott Neslin. A couple years later, I was eager to get a copy. The book is still on my shelf. The imprint on the first page says: "NU BOOK STORE AUG92...

Market Share Analysis Turns 30 Years Old

Some colleagues have called the Market-Share Analysis: Evaluating Competitive Marketing Effectivenessthe "Bible of Middlegame.” I haven’t really tried to dispute the claim. The text by Lee Cooper and Masao Nakanishi is truly a...

Really thinking Multichannel

We’ve recently connected with Sandy Jap, a Sarah Beth Brown Endowed Professor in Marketing at Emory University, to expand our thinking about transferred demand. I don’t need to ramble any further about the importance of focusing on the...

Great Advice from Bain Insights for FMCG Brands in Asia

Recently, a client pointed us to a Forbes article that has a lot of merit: "Overcoming the Pitfalls That Keep Brands from Growing in Developing Asia."    Published in early 2017 by Bain Insights, this article focuses on why...

What the Audit Parallelogram Means to Retail Analytics

We have referred to the audit parallelogram a few times in this blog as Middlegame has devoted a lot of focus on assortment, pricing and merchandising for emerging markets. I thought it would eventually be a good idea to explain the audit...

Much Ado About Coverage Analysis: The Wrong Metrics Prevail

Coverage means different things to different people. Generally, clients refer to it as the comparison between shipments volume from internal auditing systems and the volume reported by a retail tracking service like Nielsen provides....

The CIA Platform Expands Scenario Planning

While developing several hypotheses for a series of scenario-planning exercises, I noted that the Middlegame "wide-angle view"across the entire category offers an enormous opportunity to expand beyond the simulation capability of traditional...

Rethinking the Weekly Scanner Data

Over 20 years ago, I led a minor revolt at IRI that eventually had CEO Gian Fulgoni make an executive decision. John LaRocca and Jim Sullivan had given me permission to write a position paper on why IRI should forego providing weekly data and...

More Is Less

A recent Wall Street Journal article put one of the most repeated Middlegame findings front and center. Most portfolios are too big and managing all these SKUs is draining clients of resources to effectively compete and win through pricing...

Blabbering About Marketing Analytics

In late September 2017, I participated on a panel at the Marketing Metrics & Analytics Summit in Chicago. A few weeks ago, I realized that the team at Insights Exchange Network had sent me a transcript of the session shortly after the...

Levels of Demand: A Deeper Dive

  Last year, I reacted to a Retail Wire discussion on category management by going into three ways to increase sales. Recently, my colleague Anne mentioned that I kind of left the conversation hanging and that further discussion about...

Promotional Price Cuts Are Just Another Product Attribute

For quite some time, Middlegame has argued that promotional price cuts are only an additional attribute for the product during those six or seven seconds that the average shopper surveys the category and makes a choice. It was probably far...

Why is it called ATG?

Sometimes we use the blog for shameless promotion, but often I like to talk about people who have been important to Middlegame. We call these our "heroes" entries. Earlier this year, we had a soft launch of our cloud-based simulator studio...

The Real Key to Omni-Channel Management … Incrementality

One of our larger FMCG clients recently asked Middlegame if we could help them understand how to better develop and leverage Omni-Channel. Omni-channel management is a multichannel approach to sales designed to provide a seamless shopping...

Thinking like a Portfolio Manager

In the blog “Evaluating Price Response as Opposed to Price Elasticity”, I reinforced the powerful impact of transforming the marketing mindset from the “brand management” approach (which has dominated the FMCG market) to a “portfolio...

Connecting with Winners in Consumer Packaged Goods

A recent report by McKinsey and Nielsen highlights how FMCG companies could drive winning performances. It is an excellent analysis of top management practices within North American companies and is worth at least skimming through. Overall,...

Evaluating Price Response as Opposed to Price Elasticity

Last year, Amy Gallo published "A Refresher on Price Elasticity" in the Harvard Business Review). It was a great primer for how most analytics firms address price questions from marketers, and I am a little frustrated with myself for taking...

Innovate or Renovate?

All of the key principle here at Middlegame got our start in sales and marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, aka what insiders simply call “The Company.” We preach many of the do’s and don’ts we’ve learned over the years with The Company to...

Shopper Analytics and the PITA Model

While at The Coca-Cola Company, I was introduced to a fairly straightforward approach to comparing markets and their potential. It was called the PITA Model. PITA is a method for breaking down sales into the components that are the real...

Measuring the Complete Lift for Merchandising and Promotions

In a recent project, we were fairly overwhelmed by the complexity of a client’s trade promotions calendar. It contained numerous and varying discount rates that depended on a complex series of requirements, e.g. 2 for £4, 3 for £5, etc., at...

Pete Fader and Bruce Hardie: Middlegame Heroes

      It is really amazing that almost 20 years have passed since the landmark article "Modeling Consumer Choice Among SKUs" by Peter S. Fader and Bruce G.S. Hardie in the Journal of Marketing Research (November, 1996). The...

Still Learning from the Leadership in the Soft Drinks Industry

The Canadean Soft Drink Strategy Congress was recently held in Madrid. Pedro Antonio Garcia Lopez, our friend and partner at Itaca Alternative Consulting, was the chair of the event. Middlegame was eager to hear about the conference and Pedro...

Capturing the First Moment of Truth in Marketing Analytics

During a recent presentation, I had to pause when I was asked what I meant by FMOT. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it had been more than a decade since Procter & Gamble first explained in 2005 how their strategies were targeted at...

Assortment, the Missing P from Marketing Mix Modeling

For those of us with a formal marketing education in the last century, the idea of the 4Ps was the first thing drilled into our lexicon. Thanks to E. Jerome McCarthy, whose textbook many of us had for Introduction to Marketing, we all can...

Talking Shop with an Old Friend

While catching up with an old colleague last month, we each shared what we had been working on and swapped opinions on a number of business activities. As the conversation progressed, he suggested that what I was describing at Middlegame was...

Meet Lee Cooper, Now and Forever a Middlegame Hero

      In our last blog, we explained the core technology that drives the foresights that Middlegame provides: Competitive Interaction Analysis (CIA)®. During a recent conversation, one of our clients commented that CIA® was a...

Replacing Business Hunches with Science in Growth Planning

Growth planning often requires making difficult compromises. Striking a balance between addressing current business challenges, beliefs about the future and expectations from shareowners, are examples of such compromises. The final growth...

What’s the Significance of Bayesian Statistics?

  A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON PREDICTING CAUSE AND EFFECT THOUGH AN EDUCATED GUESS AND SUBSEQUENT INFORMATION BRINGS NEW VALUE A client recently asked for a better description of the Bayesian approach that we frequently reference when...

How Can You Translate Insights Into Action?

KNOWING THE LIMITS OF TYPICAL MARKETING ANALYTICS GIVES YOU A WHOLE NEW VIEW Recently, we hosted a happy hour event for one of our clients’ analytics team. While much of the conversation revolved around shop talk, one question in particular...

Making the Case for Transferred Demand Versus Incrementality

HOW EVALUATING TRADE-OFFS OF POTENTIAL STRATEGIES CAN LEAD TO WINNING MARKETING SOLUTIONS Taking our company name from a key chess term, “Middlegame” describes that critical point in a match where the player is planning both offensive and...

Why Are We So Focused on Scenario Planning?

HOW SCENARIO PLANNING KEEPS YOU PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE In a recent conversation, a potential client asked why we spent so much time talking about scenario planning as opposed to elasticities, lift coefficients, and response curves like other...

Why Take a Wide Angle View?

HOW THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE CAN RESHAPE YOUR MARKETING DECISIONS The primary objective of shopper response analytics is to explain purchasing behavior and then effectively utilize those learnings for commercial purposes. For the typical...

Another Incredible Ride for a Middlegame Hero

How can this pioneer’s work impact your decisions today? This month, Len Lodish, Samuel R. Harrell, Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, and his wife, Susan, finished another incredible bike ride as a fundraiser for ALS. This annual...

Welcome to Middlegame

Welcome to the Middlegame Marketing Sciences web site A primary objective for all business leaders is to find new and sustainable growth. This requires identification and prioritization of opportunities based on expected returns. Big data...

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