What do you do when you’re striving to increase your team’s impact while also being asked to do more with less?
This was the challenge issued to the Brooks Bell team from our client, a global apparel brand. Despite the brand’s prominence, the company struggled to compete against the major legacy brands in their vertical. Additionally, the scale of its marketing organization made it challenging for our point of contact, the VP of Marketing, to determine the best way to optimize efforts.
But this work was critical as the global marketing team—viewed as a cost center—faced the recurrent specter of layoffs and reorganizations. Exhausted from the constant cycle of building and rebuilding, the VP sought a partnership with Brooks Bell to chart a new course.
Their central question: How can we deepen leadership’s understanding of marketing’s impact on revenue, while also increasing our effectiveness and efficiency to mitigate the risk of reorganization?
The Assessment
At Brooks Bell, many clients come to us disillusioned by the one-size-fits-all solutions offered by larger firms, and seek the personalized attention and meaningful results that only a boutique firm can deliver. True to this, our team spent the first weeks of the partnership conducting a deep assessment to uncover the root issues stifling growth and productivity.
This assessment revealed a scattered approach, with marketing efforts spread thin across various channels and lacking cohesion. Additionally, the absence of a consistent process to measure marketing effectiveness meant that campaign contributors were goaled based on the quantity of their output, rather than the impact of their work on the organization’s goals.
The Strategy
Equipped with these insights, we proposed a holistic approach to revamp the marketing organization, starting with establishing a dedicated Marketing Effectiveness team. This new team, built with talent sourced internally, would oversee data insights, marketing automation, predictive marketing, test and learn, and CRM marketing.
The test and learn department was an important development. By having a dedicated experimentation practice, our client was able to cultivate a more customer-centric approach, reward campaign performance based on results, and foster a culture of continuous learning. Additionally, by more tightly integrating marketing and CRM data, our client was able to refine lifecycle marketing campaigns. With this and through partnering with our data science practice, we helped our client determine an accurate measure of attribution, incrementality and uncover purchase propensity.
Brooks Bell’s consultants also transformed the team’s campaign workflow – unifying efforts across all contributors, incorporating automation, and streamlining parts of the process from over three weeks to three days. Our team also created processes for data management and analysis, and dashboards, which leveraged our clients’ existing tech stack rather than forcing any unnecessary re-platforming.
With access to the data they needed to assess the health of marketing campaigns and channel initiatives, our executive contact was better equipped to articulate their team’s impact, and what would happen to marketing revenue if changes to the strategy or team were made.
Key Results
Over the course of our partnership, we’ve designed over 30 initiatives that empowered the marketing organization to define, implement, and scale a strong culture rooted in customer curiosity, effectiveness and efficiency. The impact of our work was felt throughout the marketing organization, in the form of the following results and milestones:
- Established, hired and staffed the new Marketing Effectiveness team, which today comprises four departments and 25 individuals.
- Reduced parts of the marketing campaign execution process from over three weeks to three days and increased campaign volume by over 35%.
- Founded a centralized test and learn department and processes. Since its establishment, the team has driven more than $40M in incremental revenue.
- Brooks Bell consultants continue to facilitate cross-functional quarterly planning workshops for the global marketing and ecommerce organization.
The Impact
In the first year of our partnership, our client witnessed a paradigm shift in their marketing approach – transitioning from quantity-driven to performance-driven strategies.
By leveraging experimentation and refining analytics processes, Brooks Bell consultants revealed opportunities to streamline investments in key channels, leading to higher campaign effectiveness and ROI. The partnership also reshaped internal team dynamics, empowering collaboration across teams that previously had no interaction.
The new Marketing Effectiveness team emerged as a catalyst for innovation, offering the broader team critical insights to refine strategies and drive growth. Suddenly, email marketers were building campaigns using insights sourced from paid media strategists, and engagement was going through the roof.
Ultimately, all of this work empowered our client with the insights they need to replicate successful strategies, source new ideas, and ignite a culture of innovation and growth. However, it was our stakeholder’s openness to Brooks Bell’s perspectives that enabled us to build a genuine partnership that evolved alongside the organization’s needs. Even today, we remain trusted partners and collaborators.