It's a question every marketer asks: What's the best mix of activities to drive the most sales?
These days, more businesses are asking those questions using The Emerging Marketplace, a web-based technology developed by Cincinnati-based ThinkVine.
While the questions are age-old, ThinkVine's technology is leading edge. In fact, according to Chief Executive Officer Damon Ragusa, his company uses SimCity-like game technology to find the answers.
"We create artificial populations to create live, simulated environments of the marketplace," he explains. "It's a very realistic simulation of real environments. We care about why things happen, not just what. "
Founded in 1999 as an advanced analytics and economic modeling consulting firm, ThinkVine refined tools developed in that business to launch Emerging Marketplace earlier this year.
"There had been little evolution as to how the work was being done," Ragusa says. "You can hire a group of statisticians to (to review historical data), and they will go away for six, seven, nine months, and come back with a report."
By contrast, Ragusa says Emerging Marketplace's simulations are based on how real people use media and are real time, meaning a client can ask "what if" questions and get immediate answers.
Ragusa cites a growing clientele that includes businesses like LegalZoom, Hershey's, Del Monte, Novartis, Pepsico, Sunny Delight and Miller Brewing. With help from a $500,000 grant through CincyTech, "we are looking at triple digit growth in revenue and number of brands under contract. We currently don't report number of employees but we increased our employee base by five-fold year over year and plan to increase again in 2010 by roughly 75 percent."
Source: Damon Ragusa, ThinkVine
Writer: Gene Monteith