Unlocking the Potential of Your Portfolio
Many organizations can point to brands that are “hitting their numbers,” yet the corporate P&L tells a different story. The gap emerges because most measurement programs still evaluate brands in isolation rather than a corporate portfolio —ignoring the way brands source from, or halo to, one another across channels and occasions. In fact, despite an explosion of tools and data, only about a third of CEOs report confidence in their marketing ROI measurement, underscoring that something is structurally off in how we quantify value.
What’s Broken (and Why It Matters)
Traditional, brand‑level marketing mix and trade promotion models were never designed to answer portfolio questions. They optimize media brand by brand, and promotions channel by channel—while corporate results depend on the total performance of a portfolio of brands across sales channels and net of halos and cannibalization. The inevitable consequences are that trade is often incorrectly overstated, media is often incorrectly understated, making advertising and promotion investments and planning sub-optimal and inefficient.
Three forces that drive poor measurement are:
1. Siloed design choices – Analytics projects are scoped at the brand level, ignoring portfolio brand interactions.
2. Granularity without context – Models focus on SKU or channel-level detail without accounting for cross-SKU or cross-channel effects, ROI.
3. Operating incentives – Brand teams are accountable for their own brand’s KPIs, creating bias toward local optimization rather than portfolio growth.
This leads to poor planning decisions. Across industries, brand‑only measurement routinely misallocates 20–40% of their advertising and promotional investments.
A Portfolio‑Centric Solution
Portfolio‑centric analytics reframe the analysis from the performance of individual brands to portfolio health. Instead of asking, “What is Brand A’s ROI?” the model asks, “Which brand, which marketing effort and in which channel does my next dollar spend return the most to the corporate portfolio?”
This approach:
- Quantifies cross‑brand impacts—both halos (when Brand A’s media lifts Brand B) and cannibalization (when Brand A’s promotion steals from Brand B).
- Accounts for cross-sales channel shopping (e.g., brick and mortar vs e-comm, grocery vs. club), so plans reflect shelf context, occasion, and compliance.
- Separates shared environmental forces (inflation, category trends, competitor actions) from brand‑specific responses, avoiding false attributions.
- Optimizes at multiple levels (brand, portfolio, category), enabling growth of corporate ROI, not just brand ROI.
Model Layers
By modeling multiple layers, simultaneously, it allows to segment what drives contraction and/or growth of the category and portfolio layer (e.g., macro, consumer trends, competition), and what drivers cause share growth and/or share shifting in the brand layer (e.g., media, trade, price, innovation, and distribution).
Compared with aggregating the drivers of separate brand models, Simultaneous Modeling:
- Systematically measures direct and cross effects for every driver, so net incrementality is correctly captured.
- Provides equal visibility into brand and portfolio KPIs, reconciling what each tactic “does to the brand” with “what it does to the portfolio.”
- Helps prevent misattribution (e.g., typically overestimating the impact of promotions and underestimating the impact of media).
Data Needs
Most organizations have the data required to run a portfolio or category growth driver analysis. In most cases, the heavy lifting comes from model design, not new data. Using a company’s own sales, price, promo, media, distribution, and financial data and augmenting the data with publicly available macroeconomic, consumer trend and seasonal data is all that is required.
Enabling Better Decision Making:
A category and portfolio-centric modeling approach earns its keep in day-to-day decision making—by better decision making and planning to meet quarterly, annual and long-term growth objectives. Planning includes support for:
Media
Media’s contribution is often underestimated in siloed models because halo effects across brands aren’t and net to Portfolio are not captured correctly. Portfolio analytics is uniquely suited to estimate these cross-brand effects and measure the net impact to portfolio. For example, rather than evaluating a social campaign only by its effect on one snack brand, the analysis can capture the same campaign’s halo impacts to other portfolio brands—making the case for scaling media spend. This ensures future media plans account for campaigns that grow the entire portfolio, not just individual brands.
Promotions & Co-Activation
The model identifies which SKUs or trademarks work best together in joint activations and which combinations risk cannibalization. For example, understand which two snack brands to co-promote and which brand & pack sizes to avoid promoting during game season to drive incremental portfolio sales. This ensures promo and merchandising planning maximizes incremental portfolio growth and mitigates share shifting between brands.
Innovation
Developing new products is a vital corporate engine of growth if the product is incremental to the overall business. Portfolio analytics quantifies the true incrementality of new product introductions not just to a brand but to the corporate portfolio net of any sourcing from other brands. This informs development teams of which new brand features and go to market approaches incremental to corporate growth not just incremental to the focus brand.
Price
Price elasticities are measured as direct, cross, and net impacts to both brands, cross-brand and portfolio levels. By knowing the implications for pricing actions to both volume, revenue and profit to both brand and net to portfolio allows our corporate clients to simulate what-if pricing scenarios to meet corporate planning objectives.
Rebalancing Corporate Investments
Portfolio-centric modeling attempts to correct for any measurement bias that occurs with siloed brand models to ensure better investment planning decisions across multiple brands and drivers (e.g., marketing, pricing, promo, innovation and more) that drive corporate growth.
Proven Business Impact
Smarter allocation delivers measurable growth
A global spirits manufacturer with a portfolio of over 200 brands—implemented portfolio-centric measurement and optimization to move beyond siloed brand analysis. By adopting simultaneous modeling, the company gained visibility into cross-brand and cross-channel effects, enabling smarter allocation decisions across its diverse portfolio.
Using these insights, the global spirits company reallocated its existing spend across brands and tactics, achieving a +6% lift in sales and +7% increase in profit (CAAP)—all without adding budget. This wasn’t just a tactical win; it demonstrated how portfolio-centric modeling unlocks efficiencies that brand-level approaches miss.
Across industries, companies that move from siloed brand analysis to portfolio-level optimization typically see ROI improve by about 30%, thanks to smarter trade/media balance and reduced cannibalization.
The Bottom Line
If your models aren’t built to systematically measure portfolio interactions, they’ll never find them. Teams that adopt a portfolio‑centric, simultaneous modeling framework reclaim misallocated budget, lift sales and profit without extra spend, and make merchandising, innovation, and pricing decisions that compound across the entire franchise. You rarely need new data—you need a better lens and a cohesive design.
Ready to unlock your portfolio’s potential?
Should you wish to discuss how portfolio-centric analytics might apply within your context, please feel free to reach out for additional examples and guidance.
Discover how breaking down silos in business decision-making drives smarter portfolio choices and accelerates growth. Watch Gloria Rosenberg (CEO, MFA), Karen Chisholm (Director, Matrix & Marketing Analytics, Pernod Ricard), and Tamir Choina (SVP, MFA) as they share practical strategies and real-world insights from leading brand portfolios.
