Fazer: Driving Growth in a Complex Retail Environment
Fazer is one of Finland’s most iconic brands, known for its beloved chocolate and confectionery products.
Like many consumer brands, Fazer manages a wide range of marketing levers simultaneously:
- Price promotions across retailers and formats
- Shopper marketing and in-store activations
- A mix of offline and digital media channels
While each of these activities plays an important role, their combined impact - and trade-offs - were not fully transparent.
To address this, Fazer partnered with Sellforte to implement a comprehensive Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) framework covering:
- Price promotions (including different promotion types)
- Shopper marketing activations
- Paid media across offline and online channels
- Both short-term and long-term marketing impact
This unified approach enabled Fazer to evaluate all marketing activities within a single, consistent framework and make data-driven decisions across teams.
1. Marketing’s True Role Alongside Baseline Demand
Sellforte’s analysis provided clear visibility into how marketing contributes to overall performance by separating:
- Baseline demand
- Incremental impact driven by marketing, both in the short-term and long-term
This helped Fazer quantify the true role of marketing in driving growth, enabling better planning and expectation setting across the organization.
2. Price Promotions Are Powerful - But Require Precision
Price promotions emerged as one of the most impactful short-term drivers of sales.
At the same time, the analysis revealed important nuances:
- Different promotion types (e.g. single vs. bundled offers) perform differently depending on the context
- There is a clear trade-off between volume uplift and revenue impact, varying across brands
These insights enabled Fazer to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach toward a more targeted and optimized promotion strategy.
3. Shopper Marketing Strengthens Retail Execution
Shopper marketing activities, such as in-store visibility and retail media, proved to be a powerful complement to pricing actions.
The results showed that:
- Strong retail execution can significantly enhance campaign performance
- Combining pricing with in-store activation delivers stronger outcomes than either in isolation
This reinforced the importance of coordinated planning between marketing and retail teams.
4. Each Media Channel Plays A Distinct Role
Sellforte’s modeling highlighted that different media channels contribute in different ways:
- Some channels are more effective at driving immediate engagement and conversion
- Others play a stronger role in long-term brand building
Additionally:
- Not all channels scale equally
- Efficiency varies depending on investment levels and execution
These insights gave Fazer a clearer understanding of how to balance short-term performance with long-term growth.
5. Marginal Returns Enable Smarter Budget Allocation
A key benefit of MMM was visibility into marginal ROAS—how returns change as investment increases.
This allowed Fazer to:
- Identify where additional spend drives the most incremental value
- Avoid overinvestment in channels with diminishing returns
- Reallocate budgets more effectively across the marketing mix
Moving from average performance metrics to marginal insights enabled a shift toward more precise, ROI-driven decision-making.
Impact: From Fragmented Measurement to Unified Decision-Making
With Sellforte, Fazer gained:
- A holistic view of marketing effectiveness across all key levers
- Improved ability to compare and prioritize investments
- Clear guidance on optimizing promotions and media allocation
- Enhanced collaboration across marketing, sales, and retail teams
Most importantly, Fazer moved from fragmented measurement to a unified, data-driven approach to growth.
As Aaron Barsness, CMO at Fazer, explains:
“Many of our brands are built on emotion and trust and in a category where purchase decisions are often made in the moment. This makes it critical for us to understand what truly drives consumer choice. Sellforte has given us a unified view across pricing, media, and retail, helping us connect both short-term activation and long-term brand building directly to business outcomes.”
“Sellforte has given us a unified view across pricing, media, and retail, helping us connect both short-term activation and long-term brand building directly to business outcomes.”
Aaron Barsness
CMO, Fazer