The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2004–2010
DHL added $1.32B to brand value by optimizing marketing spend per country
Deutsche Post DHL scored brand-building activities by ROI and let local managers allocate budgets by optimization, raising brand value $1.32B in five years.
Deutsche Post DHL
the move
Deutsche Post DHL's express delivery business competes on global brand strength, but marketing decisions were made locally with little visibility into which activities actually grew the brand. In 2004 the company introduced an operations-research-based brand assessment tool.
The tool has been used in more than 20 large countries on four continents. It scores brand-building activities by their measured impact on brand value and uses optimization to allocate marketing resources across activities and markets, giving local brand managers a defensible budget plan instead of a guess.
The measured result: an estimated USD 1.32 billion increase in brand value over five years, a return on investment of 38 percent and an internal rate of return of 24 percent. The INFORMS 2010 Edelman finalist summary records that OR models increased the brand value of Deutsche Post DHL in Germany by over $1 billion in five years.
why it works
- It made marketing spend measurable: each activity's brand impact became a number.
- Optimization allocated the budget across countries and activities rather than by history.
- Local managers adopted it because it gave them a defensible plan, not a directive.
what transfers
Brand marketing is usually judged by spend, not return; DHL shows it can be optimized like any portfolio by scoring activities on measured brand impact and allocating the budget mathematically.
what came after
DHL kept the tool in use and expanded it across markets; the team reached the finals of the 2010 Franz Edelman Award. The approach also changed DHL's strategy and organization, moving brand decisions from intuition toward portfolio-style analytics.
references
- Managing Global Brand Investments at DHL — Interfaces (via RePEc)
- Introduction: 2010 Franz Edelman Award — Interfaces (via RePEc)
- 2010 Franz Edelman Award finalist booklet
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