The Challenge
The heritage rice vinegar brand faced mid-year revenue shortfalls and increasing pressure to defend spend efficiency. With trade budgets locked and shopper behavior shifting, traditional static planning made it difficult to forecast recovery paths or justify reallocation to Finance. The team needed a more precise way to model ROI scenarios and guide profitable, forecast-based decisions.
The Solution
The heritage rice vinegar brand partnered with Helix and Keen to shift from static budgeting to predictive, scenario-based planning. Using Keen’s platform, the team modeled 20+ marketing tactics – including retail media, influencer, trade, and digital – across FY25–FY27 to forecast outcomes and long-term impacts. They tested “optimize budget” vs. “hit revenue target” scenarios, layered in fixed-budget constraints, and validated accuracy through holdout testing. These scenario plans aligned Marketing and Finance around shared ROI ranges and gave leadership confidence to act fast.
The Result
Keen’s predictive modeling projected 4–5x revenue ROI and 1.5–1.8x profit ROI while holding trade budgets flat. The brand forecasted $4.6M–$4.8M in incremental quarterly revenue and sustained over 1M units sold per quarter at improved efficiency. The model even forecasted ~$78K under budget (≈15%) while maintaining market presence. What began as a mid-year course correction became a long-term planning advantage that shifted marketing from a cost center to a profit driver.
