Too many marketers aren’t taking the time to dig into marketing analytics. There is no value in having access to data if you are not using it. The best brand leaders can tell strategic stories through analytics. Conduct a deep-dive business review at least once a year on your brand. Look at it like a brand audit that helps you dig in and see what’s going on. Otherwise, you are negligent and blindly investing your resources without knowing how they are being paid back.
Dig in on six specific sections
🌍 Marketplace
🧠 Consumers
📦 Channels
⚔️ Competitors
🏷️ Brand
📊 Financials
The deep-dive business review takes a 360-degree look at your brand
🌍 Marketplace
Start with a macro read of the category. How is the overall market performing? What headwinds and tailwinds are shaping growth? Dig into the forces that move categories—economic shifts, consumer behavior changes, technology disruption, shopper trends, and regulatory pressures. Then, scan adjacent categories for patterns that could spill over into yours or signal what’s coming next.
🧠 Consumers
Use analytics to truly understand your consumer target. Look for the beliefs, habits, and motivations driving their behavior—what’s growing, what’s declining, and why. Apply tools like brand funnel analysis and leaky bucket analysis to see how they shop, where you lose them, and what triggers their decisions. Layer in tracking studies, VOC data, and qualitative research to understand what they think and feel at every stage of the purchase journey.
📦 Channels
Evaluate how each distribution channel and every major retailer is performing. Understand their strategies, the tools they offer, and how effectively your brand is using them. Your brand must show up in a way that aligns with your customers’ priorities and supports their growth model.
⚔️ Competitors
Break down your closest competitors. Look at performance indicators, positioning, innovation activity, pricing, distribution, and how consumers perceive them. Use analytics to map out where they’re likely headed next—then use those insights to sharpen your own strategy.
🏷️ Brand
Assess your brand from every angle: consumers, customers, competitors, and employees. Bring together funnel data, tracking results, research, pricing analysis, distribution gaps, and financial indicators to get a full view of brand health. Manage both sides of the equation—brand health and brand wealth.
💰 Financials
Evaluate your full P&L to understand the economic drivers behind your brand’s performance. Know the levers that drive profitability—pricing, costs, market size, and market share—and understand when to pull each one. Strong financial discipline helps ensure that strategic choices also deliver the right economic outcomes.
Marketing analytics
Summarize your deep-dive business review
To transition from the deep-dive review to your marketing plan, use these four questions.
- First, what’s driving growth? The top factors of strength, positional power, or market inertia, which have a proven link to driving your brand’s growth. Your plan should continue to fuel these growth drivers.
- Next, what’s inhibiting growth? The most significant factors of weakness, unaddressed gaps, or market friction you can prove to be holding back your brand’s growth. Your plan should focus on reducing or reversing these inhibitors to growth.
- Then, look at the opportunities for growth: Look at specific untapped areas in the market, which could fuel your brand’s future growth, based on unfulfilled consumer needs, new technologies on the horizon, potential regulation changes, new distribution channels, or the removal of trade barriers. Your plan should take advantage of these opportunities in the future.
- Finally, what are the threats to future growth: Changing circumstances, including consumer needs, new technologies, competitive activity, distribution changes, or potential barriers, which create potential risks to your brand’s growth. Build your plan to minimize the impact of these risks.
Example of a deep-dive business review using Gray's Cookies
We summarize the business review using drivers, inhibitors, opportunities, and threats. We recommend narrowing down to the top three factors for each box. To illustrate, click to zoom in.
Deep dive business review
Putting together your deep-dive business review
This process assumes you will use your marketing analytics to put together a presentation of 15-20 slides for your management team.
Each of the five sections you go deep on should have 3-5 ideal slides. The conclusion statement at the top of each slide gets carried forward to a summary page for each of the five sections. You then draw out an overall conclusion statement for that section. You will have five conclusion statements, which you bring to the front of your presentation to form an overall summary page. From there, you draw out one major brand challenge you are seeing in the deep dive.
How to build each of the five analytical sections of the deep-dive business review
A: First, for each of the five sections of your deep dive business review, use all the data you have dug into to draw out the three hypothetical conclusions. Then, build one ideal slide for each conclusion, adding the 2-3 critical support points, and layer in the supporting visual charts. This type of analysis is an iterative process where you have to keep modifying the conclusion headline and the support points to ensure they work together.
B: Next, once you have nailed the conclusion headline for each page, you should build a summary chart for each of the five sections, which takes those three conclusion statements and builds a section conclusion statement. The example above shows how to do it for the category, which you can replicate for the consumer, channels, competitors, and the brand.
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Summarizing the deep-dive business review
C: For each of the five sections, take each section conclusion statement, move them to an overall business review summary slide, and draw one big summary statement for each of the five sections.
D: Finally, use those section conclusion statements to draw out an overall business review major issue, which summarizes everything in the analysis.
Analytical slides
How to build the ideal analytical slide
When telling your analytical story through a deep-dive business review presentation, start every slide with an analytical conclusion statement as your headline, then have 2-3 key analytical support points for your conclusion. Provide a supporting visual or graph to show the thinking underneath the analysis. Finally, you must include an impact recommendation on every slide. Never tell your management a data point without attaching your conclusion of what to do with that data.
Business review example
Example slides for a Business Review for Gray's Cookies
To illustrate, click to zoom in.
Business review template
You can download our business review templates to work on your brand
Marketing Career
How to manage your marketing career from ABM to CMO
At every level of your marketing career, you have to adjust to the new role. Brand Managers fail when they keep acting like ABMs and Directors fail when they keep acting like Brand Managers and VPs fail when they don’t know what to do. In a classic marketing team, the four key roles are Assistant Brand Manager up to Brand Manager then up to Marketing Director and on to the VP/CMO role. The use of marketing analytics is something you need to learn early and continue to refine at each level.
