An army of meteorologists with virtually unlimited computing power can’t predict the weather a few days in advance, yet you’re expected to predict your market months or even years in advance.  You need all the help you can get, and M3’s high-performance analytics server provides instant answers to many complex questions that directly affect marketing planning.

Fast and Comprehensive
The first thing you will notice is the speed.  Reports that take days or weeks to complete manually or with spreadsheets become available in minutes or seconds in M3.  This means your productivity is much higher and you can now offer broader and deeper brand coverage with the same resources.  You’ll also soon find that the integration of all relevant data enables analysis in M3 that simply wasn’t possible before.  And when it’s time to talk to the business, delivering scenario results in P&L terms will keep everyone focused on the same objectives.  In this way, M3 will take you well beyond traditional historical reporting to forward looking forecasts for every potential plan under consideration.  You can quickly create and evaluate plans that would have previously gone untested to uncover new opportunities and become the MVP of the Marketing organization.

Reality Check for the Model
M3 also helps you truly evaluate the validity of the demand model you are using for the basis of these important decisions.  It’s great that you can leverage the investment you’ve made in marketing mix models into an on-the-fly forecasting, simulation and optimization tool, but you have to know if the models are out of date with reality.  M3’s model update capabilities allow you to keep your models in sync with the latest market developments by quickly identifying and quantifying market and consumer shifts down to the lowest product and location levels.  You’ll know very quickly whether any variances are stemming from gaps in execution or poor model fit.  Best of all, you can actually fine-tune your existing demand models to reflect the latest campaign or change in consumer response in a matter of minutes.

Next Generation Solution
M3 offers the chance to eliminate complicated spreadsheets, outdated tools and manual calculations from your forecasting and tracking process forever.  By consolidating all sales channels, models and financial information into a sophisticated and easy to use enterprise application, you can complete complicated brand planning analysis in minutes to hours, instead of days, weeks or months.  And you will find optimal marketing plans that improve marketing ROI by 15 points or more.