M-Factor News

As a user of the M3 Marketing Investment Management solution, we hope you find the the following information helpful.

M3 March '08 Release Update

The March M3 release contains numerous feature enhancements. Many of the changes continue to emphasize improvements in data and software configuration and will be transparent to end users. The list below contains the feature enhancements that are of greatest interest to M3 users:

  • An all new Net Contribution by Activity report has been added.  It ranks activities by their net marketing contribution (or other selected P&L line item). The report is available for individual product groups, locations, or time periods as well as larger, more comprehensive scopes.  It provides a clear understanding of the change affected by each particular activity, and delivers insight regarding opportunities to reallocate spending toward higher performing activities.  Here's an example of the chart:

    Contribution by Activity report


  • Elasticity and Lift by Driver report enhancements: Users can now easily study cross effects by modifying drivers for one set of products and locations and observing the effects on a separate set of products and locations. For example, this greatly simplifies studying the effects of competitor prices on your product volume. Previously we modified and reported on the same set of products and locations, which was sufficient for studying your own price elasticity, but inadequate for cross-elasticities.

  • More interactive charts: Users can now drill into selected chart elements to obtain greater detail in the analysis. For example, to better understand which product groups are driving results for the brand, drill into a single brand to redraw the chart with all the product groups from that brand.  Then users can dig deeper by right clicking and selecting "Switch Attribute" to view the results by location or time period instead of by product group.  Additionally, the granularity level of driver groupings may be adjusted to show more or less driver detail through a separate right-click option.  For example, a "Media" bucket may be broken out into "TV," "Radio," "Print," etc.  All of these chart controls are available directly from the right-click menu and do not require going to the report settings page.

    • M3 Feature Spotlight

    Every user has their own perspective on the business.  Accordingly, they will find a different set of reports most helpful for their specific role.  The easiest way to  maintain a consistent focus on these key reports is to have a personalized dashboard set up that contains a group of saved reports which collectively provide the right type of analysis on the relevant products and locations.  Any saved report from the system can be included, and each user can have multiple personalized dashboards.  Here's an example of a dashboard that provides an overview across several brands, but it's just as easy to create one for a single brand or even a single account.   

    Example dashboard

    Coming Soon

    Save the date for our quarterly M3 user training web meeting, which is scheduled for April 15th at 11:00 Pacific/2:00 Eastern.  Call details and login information will be provided in a separate mailing.  The scripted portion of this session will allow the product management team to review recent system enhancements.  The team will also make time to address general user questions on any portion of the application.
     

    Request for Feedback

    The M-Factor product team is taking a comprehensive look at the usability of our solution and is considering numerous short and longer term enhancement possibilities.  There are two ways in which we could use your help.  First, is with respect to any specific usability issues that you'd like to report.  Second, is to help us more fully understand the flow and pain points of your planning processes.  Please let me know if you'd like to have a direct conversation with our product team so that we can better serve your needs.