M3 offers significant advantages over other marketing planning approaches, which will deprive your organization of the flexibility, speed, and agility required to compete most effectively in today’s dynamic markets.  This solution is:

Optimized – automatically identifying the plan that will optimize desired business (P&L) objectives.  We believe no other application can optimize multiple objectives (e.g., profit and volume) simultaneously, or simulate thousands of possible scenarios to present the best alternative in seconds.  Further, no other optimization framework on the market is capable of permitting users to change their optimization objectives or incorporate specific, custom metrics in their optimization on the fly.

Dynamic – enabling continuous insights and adjustments in changing markets. Traditional consulting-based approaches deliver results that can quickly become irrelevant as the market environment shifts.  And we know of no other software that can handle robust performance assessment requirements (Due-To, Volume Decomps, etc.) that compare forward looking scenarios and history; break down volume differences into a large number of marketing buckets for analysis; permit users to change the scenarios, reconfigure the buckets, and re-run the report in seconds at whatever level of granularity desired.

Fast – delivers results in a fraction of the time required by desktop systems, statistical packages or OLAP implementations, freeing marketers to focus on strategy and innovation rather than analysis.

Comprehensive – providing full coverage of products, regions, channels, effects, etc.  M3 brings together exhaustive data from disparate sources that are too often ignored, even for the most rigorous planning analyses.  With M3, however, this data can be used every day to influence important decisions.

Agile – allowing isolation of submarkets for focused analysis, global aggregation for portfolio optimization, and everything in between.  Most simulation tools do not operate at multiple levels of aggregation, so every simulation requires a model estimated at that level of aggregation.  This is simply infeasible in complex environments with many markets and products.

Collaborative – enabling real-time coordination across the many planning teams. Planning is not an individual exercise, and your planning solution should not limit access or visibility to a select few tech-savvy contributors or only reflect the objectives of a single team.

Scalable – complex and collaborative planning environments often call for thousands of models and multiple model forms, where results will take too long, if they come back at all using common simulation tools.

Flexible – seamlessly accommodating different data, transformations, and model forms through enterprise-class software configurability.  We believe no other simulation tool permits multiple model forms to exist without custom coding which can delay any project and limit flexibility to make model form updates as market dynamics shift.

The bottom line is that M3 delivers strategic advantage over slower moving competitors and higher ROI from funneling marketing spend into today’s best performing tactics.  With fast brand-level deployments in just 4-6 weeks, there’s no reason to wait to get started, because opportunity is lost every day that an outdated marketing plan remains in place.