Customer Success Stories - MAX Burgers: Combining short- and long-term Marketing Mix Modelling to get ahead as a challenger brand

There are few industries where the competition for the #1 brand is tougher than in the fast food industry. Max Burgers keeps its competitors on their toes, by consistently raising the bar - this time, by upgrading its marketing analytics. How? By connecting short-terms sales activation with long-term brand building.

Highlights

Max Burgers turned their data into expertise through Sellforte’s MMM solutions, that captures both the short- and the long-term impact of marketing:

• Sellforte's Short-Term (ST) model captures the immediate marketing uplifts
• Sellforte's Long-Term (LT) model was implemented in the second phase, to measure how marketing activities drove sales in the long-term
• By combining the ST & LT insights from MMM, with clever & creative marketing campaigns, MAX Burgers fortifies it’s position in the market even further

The recipe for MAXimum success

Established in 1968 by Curt Bergfors and Britta Andersson, MAX Burgers has won the consumers' hearts with its strong values in sustainability, transparency & product quality.

From the world's first-ever climate-positive menu in 2018 to highly successful guerrilla campaigns (see for example the story of Rywala Burger in Poland here ), the team keeps thriving in tough competition.

Like all successful challenger brands, MAX's secret sauce has been an efficient use of resources against a competitor with practically infinite resources.

Knowing what it takes to win, MAX wrote down the main ingredients for a successful MMM implementation:

• Fully understand the drivers behind short- and long-term sales uplifts
• Find the optimal budget split between tactical & brand campaigns
• Continually test and refine the marketing activities (with tools that provide feedback on a continuous basis)

Short-Term signals in the fast-food industry

As MAX had previously focused heavily on tactical marketing, it wanted to start by understanding thoroughly how these campaigns were driving incremental sales on top of its Baseline sales.

Analyzing previous years' ST results gave MAX a good overview of which channels and campaigns were especially effective and efficient in driving sales during and right after a campaign.

The insights confirmed some of MAX's intuitions about the best-performing channels for tactical campaigns while revealing new ways to optimize these channels' performance.

"Do you want Long-Term MMM with that?"

After successfully understanding the short-term impact of marketing, MAX Burgers was hungry for more and added LT MMM to the order.

This dual perspective not only highlighted the immediate impact of their strategies but also identified which channels deliver the most value in the long run. By comparing the two ST and LT ROIs, it became apparent that certain channels and campaigns, which had lower-than-average performance in the short term, performed exceptionally well in the long run.

The cooperation with Sellforte revealed the link between brand campaigns and long-term sales uplifts, proving that the great things MAX's marketing team does can have big impact even months after the initial campaign has ended. The LT model also revealed the relative strength of brand vs. tactical campaigns, allowing the team to get the right balance between brand vs tactical budget allocation.

Summary

These insights help MAX adjust its marketing investments to not just chase immediate gains, but to build sustainable growth and brand equity through channels that promise greater long-term returns.