SAS Marketing Performance Management Provides Rich Business Model

Like Caesar's Gaul, SAS Marketing Performance Management has three parts: SAS Marketing Scorecards, SAS Profitability Management, and SAS for Marketing Mix.

The heart of the system is the Marketing Scorecard, which provides a detailed business model specifying the relationships among various marketing measures. These are expressed as key performance indicators (KPIs) which can be displayed on scorecards, dashboards, and strategy maps in views tailored to different types of users. Because the SAS model defines the relationships among its components, it can calculate the impact of changes in one element on other elements and on the business as a whole. Of course, clients can tailor model to fit their own business. But SAS says that starting with a predefined framework shaves several months from the deployment process and forces a degree of rigor that can be missing from systems that simply report on disconnected facts.

The data mart supporting all this can combine inputs from campaign reporting, financial systems, budgets, forecasts, syndicated research, and other external sources. The system can import results from individual campaigns for detailed operational reporting, and can aggregate these to compare them against higher-level financial or plan data. It would not typically incorporate customer-level data.

SAS for Marketing Mix started out as Veridiem, a suite of applications for marketing planning, reporting, analysis and optimization based primarily on marketing mix models. SAS acquired Veridiem’s assets in March 2006. It still offers a hosted version within its OnDemand solution as Veridiem MRM.

SAS has reworked the independent Veridiem software to share data and other components with the rest of Marketing Performance Management. In fact, you cannot purchase SAS Marketing Mix without also purchasing SAS Marketing Scorecards.

The Marketing Mix system itself is an administrative tool designed to help users use mix models more effectively. It will draw information from the data mart as model inputs, allow users to modify inputs to build different scenarios, combine the results of multiple models, present the results in a variety of formats, and feed forecasts back into the data mart for reporting. The models are built outside of the system, using SAS or other vendors’ products.

The third component of Marketing Performance Management is SAS Profitability Management. This is a version of SAS’s generic profitability management software, which applies user-defined cost assignment rules to calculate profitability down as far as individual transactions.

Pricing of the Marketing Performance Management system depends on the components purchased, number of users, and other elements. Entry price is $125,000 plus one to two times that amount in professional services.