Dr. Scholl's

The brand

Dr. Scholl's has been in foot care since 1906, when podiatrist William Mathias Scholl founded it. Today it's a global leader, with more than $600M in international retail sales across the Dr. Scholl's brand in the US and the Scholl brand internationally.

Challenge

The brand didn't have a clear read on what media was driving retail sales, or where the opportunities were to invest for efficient growth. That question got sharper as the company started a Performance Marketing initiative and needed to know what measurement should look like in that context.

The complication is the retail environment. Sales run through brick-and-mortar pharmacies and supermarkets, through Amazon, and through the brand's own D2C channel. Media touches all of them, and so do trade and promotional dollars committed to specific retail partners.

Approach

Framing the outcome came first. Marketing measurement has to identify results marketing can reasonably be asked to drive, while still accounting for investments that exist because of a business relationship with a retail partner. Trade and promotional spend falls squarely in that second category.

From there the work ran through a structured Advanced Attribution Audit:

• Data harmonization. Two years of history on units sold, retail sales, and media spend and activity, reviewed and processed for modeling.
• Preliminary analysis. Trend analysis, correlations, and a basic MMM to understand how individual variables fit against units sold and retail sales, then a review of retail store categories to form a hypothesis on how many models to run.
• Marketing mix modeling. Thousands of iterations and hundreds of tranches across segments to find best-fit models. The result was a 6-model structure organized by retail category grouping.
• Triangulation. Using the MMM decompositions to understand the impact of media and promotions and the value each brings to units sold and retail sales.

Channels evaluated included Google Search (brand and non-brand), Facebook, Retail Media Networks, digital display, TV and VOD, and out of home, alongside retailer-specific trade and promotional investment.

The Marketing Accounting Framework was oriented around incremental retail sales driven by media across the retail category groupings, distilled into incremental ROAS by channel and platform. Six models meant six P&Ls, one per retail category.

Results

What it meant

The headline finding was that growth was available inside the existing budget. Shifting investment toward higher-performing tactics, measured on incremental retail sales and iROAS, did not require increasing total spend.

Trade and promo needed a more careful read. Some of that investment is the cost of maintaining a retail relationship, so the opportunity was to work with individual chains on their highest-performing tactics rather than to cut broadly.

The project also opened new questions. How does this look across different regions? Do product segments respond differently to media-influenced retail sales? Those get answered through testing and model iteration, which is the point. Measurement of this kind is a starting position, not a finished answer.