Established model
Marketing mix modelling
Developed in econometrics from the 1960s · 1960s
Statistical estimation of what each channel actually contributed, using aggregate data rather than tracking anyone.
Its place in the frameworkMarket Core›Marketing Channels
What it does
Regression of outcomes on spend across channels, with adjustments for seasonality, price, distribution and the fact that advertising keeps working after it stops. It has returned to prominence for an unglamorous reason: it needs no individual-level tracking, which makes it robust to everything that has happened to cookies and consent.
- Reach for it when
- When channels are each claiming the same conversions, and when attribution based on tracking is no longer available or believable.
- Where it stops
- It needs years of data and real variation in spend to say anything, and correlation across channels that always move together cannot be separated however good the model is.
Developed in marketing econometrics from the 1960s; see Dominique M. Hanssens, Leonard J. Parsons & Randall L. Schultz, Market Response Models, 1990.
Why it sits at Marketing Channels
How demand is created and reached: which channels are used, what each actually costs and returns, how they combine, and how any of that is known.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Channel selectionMedia planning on reach and fit, and the channel-accessibility criterion from segmentation.
- Channel economicsFully loaded acquisition costing, and the payback-period framing that makes channels comparable across timescales.
- The mixMedia-mix modelling and the long-and-short evidence on brand-building against activation.
- Testing and incrementalityIncrementality and geo-holdout testing as the correction to last-click and platform-reported performance.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Marketing Channels lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Target AudienceWhere the audience is decides which channels are available at all.
- Brand CoreEach channel constrains what the identity and the narrative can express.
- Business CoreAcquisition cost is a contribution question and belongs in the same arithmetic as margin.
- Data CoreIncrementality testing is a measurement design, not a report.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Marketing Channels too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The marketing mixThe decisions a marketer controls, gathered into four headings — and three more once a service is involved.
Elsewhere in Market Core
- PESTEL analysis
- SWOT analysis
- TAM, SAM and SOM
- The five forces
- Strategic group mapping
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- Segmentation, targeting, positioning
- Personas
- AIDA
- The consumer decision journey
- See, think, do, care
- The content marketing matrix
- STEPPS
- The 70:20:10 content mix
- Distribution intensity
- SPIN selling
- The product life cycle
- Disruptive innovation
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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