Core Advisory to Protect €300,000 in Business Margin
A Quick, Senior, and Highly Practical Assessment to Test Critical Planning, Strategy, and Media Choices Before They Become a Budget Request.
Core Advisory supported a major B2C marketplace in defining its annual promotional budget, helping the team estimate the real impact of promotions on sales and profitability.
All without initiating an extended consulting project.
3 hours of consulting, €300,000 in protected margin.
The Context: A New Lever, No History
The client had recently launched their e-commerce operation.
Promotions were a new lever for the company: no internal history, no consolidated benchmarks, little evidence on how much discounts could generate truly incremental sales without compressing margins.
The Challenge: How Much to Ask For, and How Far to Push
After the initial campaigns, the Board saw encouraging signs and asked the marketing team to accelerate the promotional plan for the following year.
The question was only seemingly simple: how much budget to request?
The point wasn’t to decide whether to run more promotions, but to understand where the limit was: how many initiatives could still create value before reaching saturation and starting to erode margin without generating additional sales.
Time was short, and the decision was significant. The team needed a quick assessment, capable of challenging assumptions before they became a formal budget request.
Our Approach: Treating Promotion as a Measurable Lever
With Core Advisory, we worked with the CMO to reframe the request within the correct scope: not “how much more to spend,” but what level of promotional investment was still sustainable in terms of effectiveness, incrementality, and net margin.
The promotional variable was evaluated within the calculation model as a business lever, on par with media: not a cost to add to the plan, but a driver to measure against the actual contribution it could generate.
The Result: A More Prudent, and More Profitable, Choice.
The analysis showed that pushing the budget to saturation would reduce overall profitability: not all sales generated by the discount would offset the lost margin.
The recommendation was therefore not to inflate the promotional plan, but to reallocate any extra budget towards channels with higher expected effectiveness.
In 3 hours, the team was able to protect approximately €300,000 in margin and present the Board with a more defensible, not just more ambitious, choice.
In this case, Core Advisory was activated by a client who was already using other Core Analytics products. The same framework, however, also works as a first point of contact when a company needs to quickly validate a critical decision.
Why It Works
Intervenes when the decision is still open: the value lies not in commenting on an already finalized plan, but in improving its assumptions before it reaches the Board.
Brings expertise where internal data is lacking: when a lever is new, comparing it with comparable markets and categories can prevent costly errors.
Reduces the risk of over-investment: helps distinguish truly incremental growth from growth bought by eroding margin.
Produces actionable synthesis immediately: a few clear points, ready to guide the team and support internal discussion.