Marketing Science
Baseline vs Incremental Sales Explorer
A simple interactive tool to understand what marketing is really moving. Adjust baseline demand, spend, seasonality, and saturation to see how observed sales split between baseline and incremental lift.
Core idea
Observed Sales = Baseline + Incremental
The main view is contribution over time. The response curve is only a supporting mechanic.
Incremental sales still matter, but the curve is flattening. This is where teams often confuse large observed sales with strong marginal impact.
Why this matters
Marketing does not create the whole business from zero. It operates on top of baseline demand.
That baseline moves over time because real demand conditions move over time.
The point of decomposition is not to remove complexity. It is to make the mechanics legible.
Built-in assumptions
Response shape, saturation point, and weekly spend variation are fixed in this version. The goal is to teach the decomposition clearly before exposing modeling assumptions.
Current media pressure in the selected period
73.9% of observed sales
26.1% of observed sales
If all observed sales were credited to the channel
Contribution over time
Stacked decomposition makes the baseline visible week by week.
This is the main chart. Each bar shows observed sales split into baseline demand and channel-driven incrementality for each week.
Selected week breakdown
Waterfall view for Week 6
This makes the logic explicit: observed sales are the result of baseline demand plus incremental lift, not a single undifferentiated number.
Baseline
1,387
Incremental
489
Total
1,876
Mechanics
The response curve is still useful, but only as supporting context.
This chart explains why the incremental layer changes with spend. It should support the decomposition, not replace it.
Incremental share
26.1%
Marginal sales / next $1k
4.0
Interpretation
How to read Week 6
The channel is adding meaningful lift, but baseline demand is still doing most of the work. This is the zone where decomposition is most useful for decision-making.
This is a seasonally strong period. Some of the observed performance comes from demand conditions, not just channel pressure.
The selected week is already in a flatter zone. Total contribution still looks good, but marginal gains are softening.
Caution
This tool is for intuition and communication. Real baseline and incrementality measurement still depends on modeling assumptions, identification strategy, and experimental or quasi-experimental evidence.
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