Integrated measures of sales, merchandising, and distribution

Abstract Managers track marketing performance with measures of sales, distribution, and merchandising. These can be calculated at different levels of aggregation with respect to geographic areas, time periods, and products. To be most useful, performance measures should have parallel and consistent meanings across the different levels. Starting from the decomposition of sales into base and incremental volume as provided by data suppliers at the underlying level of item-store-week, we define a set of performance measures that fit together into a simple model. It is shown that these definitions permit consistent aggregation into analogous measures and models at higher levels. An example drawing on Ocean Spray Cranberries data illustrates the advantages of the measures for comparing marketing performance across levels of aggregation.