Presented by J. Dennis Bender and Ross Link at the TIMS Marketing Science Conference, March ’94, Tucson, Arizona.

Our paper explores the influence of advertising, trade promotion, and manufacturer’s coupons, plus other elements of the marketing mix, on weekly supermarket sales rates for items in a frozen food product category. It uses a combination of market-level baseline data, key account chain-level data, advertising awareness and survey research data, and copy test data in an integrated market response modeling system. Weekly market-level GRP data is incorporated into the modeling of "advertising awareness" which is then directly incorporated into the sales equation via structural equation modeling. Key account-level data is used to analyze the differential sales effectiveness of trade promotion activities. "Aggregation bias" issues are discussed. The effects of advertising awareness, pantry loading (post promotion dip), and share of freezer space on the base volume sales rates are analyzed in detail. Issues related to measuring long term marketing mix effects are addressed.