Managing profitable growth for a portfolio of brands: How Garden’s Alive is governing their media mix with advanced attribution

Managing profitable growth for a portfolio of brands: How Garden’s Alive is governing their media mix with advanced attribution

MEET Abraham Kurien
Abraham Kurien

Strategist

Customer Success Leader

The Multi-Brand Marketing Problem Statement

For businesses operating in highly seasonal markets, strategic media planning is both an opportunity and a challenge. Gurney’s is a leading name in gardening and home solutions under the Gardens Alive! umbrella. Historically, Garden’s Alive has relied on Catalog to drive new customer growth and to engage existing customers. But the productivity of Catalog has waned over the years, as it has for many direct marketing brands around the country. With shifting consumer behaviors and the rise of digital channels, marketing leader  J.P Kinerk faced a crucial question, What is the most effective media mix to drive profitable growth while improving the unit economics for each of the brands?

 

Exploratory Data Analysis

The existential measurement challenge for Garden’s Alive was that most of the brands were horticultural gardening brands. Therefore consumer demand for their products was acutely seasonal, and naturally marketing investments rose and fell with the seasons as well. This manifested itself as the big colinearity problem that measurement practitioners dread. It’s nearly impossible to tease out from historical data how much of the demand was a function of the marketing versus the natural seasonality of the business.

Initial exploratory data analysis (EDA) revealed many such instances. An archetypal example was an initial correlation study that revealed a very strong relationship between existing customer catalog drops and new customer acquisition growth. Further critical reasoning established that the insight was nonsensical since existing customer catalogs are unlikely to have had such a large impact and the seasonal impact was confounding the analysis.

Nonetheless, the leadership required a deeper understanding of the incremental performance of their marketing investments and a clearer read on key business KPIs like incremental customer acquisition cost, contribution margins, and LTV for each of their brands to bring fiduciary discipline to their marketing investments. Even more critically, there was a need to align these metrics across finance and marketing teams to create a unified marketing accounting framework.

 

Approach: A nuanced marketing measurement solution to solve for constraints faced by seasonal brands

To address these challenges, JP and the team at Garden’s Alive embarked on a comprehensive marketing measurement initiative. They invested their energies in setting up an advanced attribution program across all their brands to bring academic discipline into their marketing investments.

 

Some of the key business questions they laid out for the program to address were:

  • Can we meaningfully replace catalog investments with digital marketing investments? 

  • Can we invest in upper-funnel branding to drive growth?

  • How do we reallocate investments to drive efficient growth using causal attribution?

  • How do we communicate marketing’s effectiveness with finance and senior stakeholders?

By leveraging the geo-match market testing, marketing mix modeling, and triangulation within the advanced attribution framework, Garden’s Alive set measurements for each of its brands to address the business questions laid out while handling the various seasonal and media mix nuances for each of the brands. 

 

1. Triangulation Using Multipliers

For highly seasonal brands like Breck’s Gifts and Bits & Pieces, where 80-90% of sales occur in Q4, an attribution audit was conducted to evaluate the impact of the current media mix. By combining benchmark multipliers with historical performance data, the team gained clarity on where digital investments could be maximized.

To complement this, M^2 Flywheel Analysis was introduced to assess:

  • The true cost of acquiring a new customer.

  • Break-even scenarios are based on varying levels of media spend.

  • Scenario planning for different media mix strategies, including revenue maximization, return on ad spend (ROAS) optimization, and cost savings.

 

2. Marketing Mix Modeling for New vs. Existing Customers

Gurney’s had previously run incrementality tests and established certain multipliers for measuring media effectiveness. However, to ensure accuracy and adaptability, a fresh round of MMM studies was conducted—one focused on new customer acquisition and another on existing customer retention.

By taking this dual approach, the business was able to:

  • Determine how media influenced different customer segments.

  • Derive new multipliers to refine future marketing investments.

  • Improve budget allocations for Q1 and beyond.

 

3. Geo-Match Market Testing

With Google phasing out VAC campaigns on YouTube, Garden’s Alive needed to evaluate the effectiveness of its new Demand Gen video campaigns.

A structured 3-cell geo test was implemented, covering:

  • Business-as-usual (BAU) markets

  • Hold-out markets with no spend

  • Scaled test markets with increased investment

Additionally, mid-funnel KPIs, such as engaged sessions, email sign-ups, and catalog requests, were tracked alongside direct sales.

On the Meta side, Facebook demonstrated over a 10% lift in sales in previous triangulation studies. However, ASC campaign limitations on geo-targeting necessitated a 2-cell hold-out test, designed to:

  • Validate Facebook’s contribution to incremental lift.

  • Fine-tune audience segmentation strategies.

  • Determine optimal budget distribution across digital channels.

 

 

Initial results & key takeaways

1. Improved Attribution & Budget Allocation

Through Triangulation, the business uncovered:

• Breck’s Gifts: Media drove a 45% incremental new customer rate. However, short-term break-even required a 30-percentage point increase in media impact. With a $500K digital budget, optimal reallocation could achieve a ROAS of 2.12.
• Bits & Pieces: Media drove a 57% incremental new customer rate. Catalog investments, though effective, presented an opportunity for cost reduction. A more efficient digital strategy could yield a ROAS of 4.2 with a $500K spend.

 

2. Incrementality Testing Insights

Garden’s Alive validated the following findings through Incrementality Testing:

  • Facebook: Delivered a 13% incremental lift with a ROAS of 5.2, justifying increased investments.

  • YouTube Demand Gen Video Ads: Showed no significant short-term impact on sales, yielding a ROAS of only 0.25.

  • Email Sign-Ups: Increased by 12%, demonstrating the potential for first-party data capture.

 

3. A Roadmap for 2025 & Beyond

With these insights and others, Garden’s Alive was able to establish a medium-term investment and media mix thesis to

  • Diversify its media mix for sustained growth.

  • Implement more robust attribution models for decision-making.

  • Maximize seasonal revenue opportunities while reducing inefficiencies.

 

Final thoughts: The  power of advanced attribution

JP and the team are putting in place a robust advanced attribution program to govern their marketing investments and right-size their marketing investments to deliver profitable growth. By embracing a nuanced marketing measurement framework, they have set the foundation for a scalable, data-driven future.

 

“Finally an attribution model that’s on OUR side, very glad we found M-Squared. If I only had one shot at making it work, M-Squared would be in my corner.”
- JP Kinerk