Harnessing Seasonality and Trends for Strategic Planning

Unless it is a one-time marketing event, such as opening pop-up stores or occasional celebratory product sales, there will always be impacts on the marketing outcomes from time components. For example, companies selling umbrellas will naturally see significant sales increases during rainy seasons. Not only can there be seasonal impacts on businesses but there can also be general trends in businesses. For example, businesses selling landline phones will see a gradual decline in their sales as people use mobile phones more and more.

This chapter discusses in depth the temporal impacts on marketing campaigns and how to utilize them for the most efficient marketing strategies. We will introduce the basics of time-series analysis, such as some of the common approaches to identifying overall trends and anomalies and visualizing time-series data. We’ll then move on to exploring how time-series data can be decomposed into...