Marketing Management Analytics Enhances its Pricing Solution for Optimal Short- and Long-Term Sales and Profit Management

Solution helps manufacturers, retailers and restaurants understand and proactively manage their pricing strategy in the marketplace. End Quote

Stamford-Norwalk, CT (1888PressRelease) September 12, 2012 - Marketing Management Analytics (MMA), a leader for the past 22 years in helping companies plan, execute, forecast and optimize their brand portfolios, marketing, pricing and product innovation investments, today announced additional enhancements to its market leading Strategic Pricing Analytics solution that will help major brands optimize the return on investment from their pricing decisions.

"Pricing has become increasingly more important, complex and harder to measure and manage in a world of shifting consumer attitudes, loyalties and ever-fragmented media vehicles," said Patrick Cummings, CEO of MMA. "Enhancements to our Strategic Pricing Analytics solution, which includes a holistic mix of predictive analytics, consultative expertise and intuitive, easy-to-use software, enable marketers to achieve shorter-term revenue and volume objectives through price and promotion while balancing the need to grow brand loyalty and equity through synergistic marketing."

MMA, recognized as a pioneer of marketing mix modeling, takes an approach to pricing analytics that focuses on two key dimensions many strategic pricing initiatives don't account for. First, it takes advantage of the increased availability of rich sources of highly granular consumer data, enabling clients to better understand the interplay between price competition via search and traditional price-influencing channels, and the impact of price change on the item, brand, category, total store/restaurant and portfolio. Second, MMA overlays price response with attitudinal data to better understand the reason behind price elasticities, shedding light on the interaction of consumer preferences and price.

"Leveraging better, more granular behavioral data combined with the 'why' derived from consumer attitudinal data better informs the strategic plan and provides a level of recency and predictability that is very beneficial to our clients," said Todd Gustafson, PhD and Executive Vice President of Analytics at MMA.

Strategic Pricing Analytics from MMA provides pricing decision makers with real-time and forward-looking insights into pricing value creation, answering pricing strategy questions such as:

• What are the short- and long-term impacts of a price change on volume, profit, share and competition?
• How do I maximize pricing and profits within target consumer segments?
• What is the impact of competitive pricing actions?
• What is my optimal everyday price?
• What items and price zones are more/less price elastic?
• How do I optimize pricing across demographic and ethnic market segments?
• What is the right depth of discount and how often should I promote and/or bundle certain items?
• How does price impact brand health in the short and long run?
• How do price changes at the item level translate to changes in brand, category, total store/restaurant and portfolio sales?

"Understanding and proactively managing pricing in the marketplace is fundamental to driving profitable volume in an efficient and effective manner," said Mitch Papkirk, Director of North American Finance at GlaxoSmithKline. "Working with MMA, we are able to identify market-changing opportunities that enable us to predictively analyze and optimize our pricing so that we can be confident of maximizing our chances of improved financial returns on our pricing actions before they take effect."

"Pricing plays a key role in our focus on increasing customer satisfaction and growing brand loyalty," said Jim Morey, Chief Financial Officer at Wawa Inc. "The complexity of our offer makes it critical to look at pricing holistically in order to understand how best to optimize our customer value proposition while continuing to enhance profitability. By partnering with MMA, we are able to achieve our goals on both fronts."

Cummings said there is accelerating momentum behind product-driven companies and retailers alike to better understand and predict pricing dynamics in order to build profitable growth and market share.

"We work closely with our clients to identify, collect and integrate the abundance of data necessary to create predictive analytics that are fact based and lead to actionable insights," said Cummings. "We then deliver them in a way that enables decision makers to shape and guide pricing and promotion strategies and tactics to generate incremental value, be it incremental profits, sales or share. By helping our partners identify and quantify high-impact pricing ROI areas, we can help them quickly convert pricing opportunities into high-value returns."

About MMA
MMA is a unit of leading global custom market research company Ipsos. MMA provides leading analytics services for companies in consumer products, retail, restaurants, pharmaceuticals, durable goods, financial services, automotive, telecommunications and media & entertainment. For more information on MMA, please visit http://www.mma.com/about_mma.html.

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