Quantifying the importance, contribution and efficiency of Cotton Inc.’s paid, owned and earned media through customer journey modelling

As brand managers and marketing professionals struggle to optimise marketing spend in a post-digital world, many are using the prominent paid, owned and earned (PEO) media model to plan and execute marketing communications. However, when it comes to quantifying the contribution and efficiency of PEO media on business outcomes (such as revenues), marketing professionals struggle to quantify the effects of owned and earned media, which often have low or no direct effect on revenues because they are typically created to have an intermediate or long-term effect on brand attitudes. While marketers quantify paid media effects on revenues using either market response models, which are econometric models, or attribution models, it is not permitted to measure intermediate effects with these methods. Using Cotton Incorporated as a case study, this paper presents a customer journey model, or integrated approach, with brand attachment as a proxy for the intermediate effect. The resulting model is an objective approach to link POE media to demand and describe contribution and efficiency in terms of both revenue and brand attachment. This approach enabled data-driven insights that were used to evaluate and optimise Cotton Incorporated’s entire POE marketing communications efforts more accurately than traditional methods.