Tchibo: Brewing Growth Across a Complex Retail Ecosystem
For 75+ years, Tchibo has been delighting customers with high-quality products ranging from its iconic coffee to a constantly refreshed assortment of non-food goods — including one of its most beloved segments, Kids Clothing. With ~900 own stores, ~16,000 depots in grocery & specialist retail, and a strong ecommerce platform, Tchibo operates one of EMEA’s most complex multi-channel retail ecosystems.
As marketing channels and customer journeys became increasingly diverse across Own, Retail Partners, and Online sales, the team needed transparent, always-on measurement that could keep pace with this growing complexity. They also wanted the confidence to adapt their media mix proactively through the year, rather than relying on infrequent, annual evaluations.
To achieve this, Tchibo turned to Sellforte’s Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Media Optimizer.
How Tchibo Boosted ROAS by 9% in Its Kids Category
One of the highlights of Tchibo’s annual calendar is the Kids Autumn Collection, a major seasonal moment and a category beloved by customers.
When the team reviewed the previous year’s campaign, Sellforte’s MMM uncovered a clear and actionable insight: one media channel had absorbed roughly 40% of the total budget while delivering the lowest ROAS performance in the mix. While the team had long suspected inefficiencies, Sellforte quantified the issue and revealed exactly where the imbalance lay.
Armed with these insights, the brand team rebalanced the media mix for the following year’s launch, reducing investment in the lowest-performing channel and reallocating spend toward stronger-performing channels. The results were clear:
Key results:
- 9% improvement in ROAS efficiency YoY
- Improved channel balance, reducing last year’s over-concentration in the lowest-ROAS channel
- Efficiency gains despite weaker online channel performance vs. last year, which would otherwise have pulled total campaign ROAS down
“The Sellforte MMM platform has become an indispensable tool for our data-driven marketing planning, providing a valuable basis for our daily work.”
Timo Ebert
Marketing Director, Tchibo
Elevating Measurement & Execution
Beyond financial impact, the collaboration elevated measurement and execution in marketing:
-
Scenario planning became part of monthly marketing routines
-
Expansion underway: Based on the success in Kids, Tchibo is planning to expand MMM coverage to additional product categories
With transparent MMM and powerful simulations, Tchibo established a repeatable way to optimize budgets across channels and categories, achieving a 9% improvement in ROAS efficiency for the Kids Autumn Collection while strengthening the foundation for broader, portfolio-wide marketing decisions.
