The work · 01

The whole business in one model

A retail beauty brand whose media, trade and distribution decisions had never been in the same room.

One model for the whole businessProduct, price, place, promotion and media by channel feed one model with a sustainability check; the model produces household penetration and repeat rate under three scenarios shown as a range.InputsProductRange, pack, innovationPriceList, promoted, depth of discountPlaceDistribution, retailers, shelfPromotionTrade, coupons, retail mediaMedia by channelTV, video, social, search, retail mediaOne modelEvery lever, one placeEach channel scored againstmeasured lift, not platform claimsSustainability checkPenalizes any plan that leansharder on promotion than thebrand's equity can carryOptimistic · Base · Conservativerun as three versions of the year,not oneOutcomes, as rangesHousehold penetrationconservativebaseoptimisticRepeat rateconservativebaseoptimistic
Illustrative. The shape of the model, not the client's figures. Three teams, marketing, sales and finance, planned the following year from it.

The situation

A retail beauty brand with roughly thirty million dollars of retail sales and household penetration that had grown quickly and then slowed. Media, trade promotion and distribution were each being decided by the people closest to them, on their own evidence, and the company's growth plan was the sum of three plans that had never been reconciled. The category was promotion-heavy, which made the short-term numbers look fine and the long-term ones worse every year.

What I did

Built one model that took all four levers as inputs: product, price, place and promotion, alongside media by channel, and connected them to the two outcomes the business actually ran on, household penetration and repeat rate. Every media channel was scored against measured lift rather than industry averages or what the platform reported. A simple sustainability check sat inside it, penalizing any plan that leaned harder on promotion than the brand's equity could carry. Budget scenarios were then run three ways, optimistic, base and conservative, so leadership had a range to decide inside rather than a single figure to defend.

What changed

The chief marketing officer, the head of sales and the finance lead planned the following year from the same model, which had not happened before. The argument moved from whose number was right to which scenario the company wanted to be in.

What I would do differently now

The lift data came from studies run at different times under different conditions, and I treated them as more comparable than they were. Today I would put a confidence level on each channel's score and let that shape how far any scenario could lean on it.

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