Connecting marketing to the sales it creates

How BearTech helped HECK! bring scattered sales and marketing data into one trusted Microsoft Fabric foundation, so the team can target campaigns, measure what works, and make decisions with confidence.

In short

HECK! is a fast-growing food brand with a marketing team full of energy and ideas, and, until recently, no reliable way to measure the impact of its work. Sales could be tracked, but campaigns could not be connected to the sales they created or the social impact they created for the brand, and the detail that would let a modest budget be judged against what was spent simply was not there.

BearTech built the missing foundation and the measurement on top of it: a clean, well-modelled data platform in Microsoft Fabric that brings retail sales, campaign spend, social performance and direct-to-consumer sales into one place, and a suite of dashboards that gives every campaign, channel and product a consistent measure of uplift and return. Delivered in clear phases and plain business language, it has given HECK! transparency across teams, confidence in the numbers, and the beginnings of a decision model for where marketing spend works hardest.

This is the story of what we built, and what it has changed.

More instinct than insight

HECK! had grown quickly, and like many ambitious brands its reporting had not grown with it. There was data, and the sales team could track sales, but judging whether a campaign had worked was more instinct than insight. Performance was read off total sales over the period a campaign ran, not tied to the specific activity, store or region that drove it.

Digital campaigns were easier. Engagement could be seen through social tools, but even then the line from engagement to actual sales was missing. Across teams there was little shared visibility. The marketing team was producing excellent, committed work, but it was not being measured.

For HECK!, the opportunity was to get much smarter with the information it already had, and use it to make better decisions across the business.

Why now

Two things made the timing right. The business had a clear new communications and marketing strategy and wanted to better understand what was driving performance and the impact of different activity. And HECK! had brought in people who could own the data and actually look at it, because, as Mel put it, you can have all the data in the world, but it only becomes valuable when people actually use it. With more activity planned, measurement was only going to matter more.

"We needed a partner we could go on the journey with, into our data transformation. You understood this was part of a bigger picture, not just a quick project."

Mel Drummond, Strategy and Innovation, HECK!

Connect the work to the result, without the jargon

The brief had a few parts. Connect marketing activity to real sales, down to region and store rather than headline totals. Build it on a foundation solid enough to trust and to grow on. Make it genuinely usable for a creative team, not just for analysts. And do all of it against a modest budget, where targeting the right areas matters more than spending more.

HECK! had spoken to other providers and found that some simply quoted a price to deliver a project. What HECK! wanted was a partner who would understand the bigger picture and build for it.

"It doesn't feel like there is any smoke and mirrors. With data transformation you are in realms you aren't an expert in, so you have to trust the people you are working with. We are quite quirky, not a big corporate, and there's been a very natural fit. You genuinely feel like an extension of our team."

Mel Drummond, Strategy and Innovation, HECK!

A clean foundation, then a way to measure everything on top

We began with a discovery session and a detailed statement of work, written in business language rather than data talk, so the whole business could see what we were doing and what they would get. Mel described those documents as pages long, but so clearly broken down that she understood exactly what was coming, and something the team still refers back to rather than signing and filing away.

The foundation

At the centre is a clean, well-governed data platform in Microsoft Fabric. It brings together information that used to sit in separate places, across sales, marketing and direct-to-consumer, into one trusted view. Everything that goes in is cleaned and checked against built-in housekeeping rules, and modelled semantically, so the data is consistent, trustworthy and ready for whatever comes next, including AI. A dedicated data quality view keeps that reliability visible rather than assumed. Mel calls it the castle, a fortress where the data is laid out well and you can rely on what comes out.

"Microsoft Fabric is a little bit like our castle. The structure and semantic modelling behind the data is what makes it a fortress. We know the data inside is clean, consistent and something we can trust. That gives us a strong foundation for the future, and for AI."

Mel Drummond, Strategy and Innovation, HECK!

Measuring what a campaign really did

The heart of the work is a consistent way to measure uplift. For each campaign we compare sales while it was live against the period before it, to show the difference the activity actually made, as a value and as a percentage, and then set that against spend to give a return on investment. Brand and above-the-line campaigns are measured across all retailers, to capture the halo effect they create for the whole brand, while targeted campaigns are measured against the specific retailers and stores they ran in. It means very different things, a social push, a paid influencer, an aisle fin, a shelf barker, a price promotion, can all be weighed on the same basis and ranked side by side.

A view for every level of the question

On top of the foundation sits a connected suite of dashboards, each answering a different question. A marketing summary gives leadership the portfolio view. Campaign reporting lets the team compare every campaign from best to worst, then open any single one as a full post-campaign deep dive, with the campaign start and end marked against the daily sales line. Media dashboards show which channels, formats and retailers are driving uplift. Product dashboards bring it down to individual lines. And a direct-to-consumer dashboard tracks online revenue by source.

Because the modelling was done properly up front, changing how the team wants to see things is quick. There is no need to rebuild the foundations each time a new question comes up.

Delivered in phases

We delivered in phases, each one showing value before the next began. That, with the clarity of the scope, is what managed the risk. There have been no was it in the scope or not conversations, because everything was clear, and as each phase landed it tended to spark ideas for the next.

Marketing that can measure itself

The clearest change is transparency. The management team and the marketing team now share one trustworthy view of performance. Marketing can be far more targeted, promoting to loyal areas or lifting engagement where it is low, and tailoring activity by region rather than spreading a small budget evenly. Some media has already been ruled out as ineffective for certain things.

For HECK!'s marketing controller, Helen, it is the measurement that was missing when she joined, now in place, so a strong team's work can be made more effective. And crucially, the dashboards are being used. Data can feel daunting, especially in a creative world, and a dashboard only earns its keep if people open it. These are laid out well enough that the team actually does.

One concrete example: HECK! has found that shelf barkers work better than some other in-store media for certain products, and is now trialling other media to compare, building a decision model for where spend works hardest. The team is honest that this is a journey. The hard return-on-investment figures will come as the baseline builds, and some of marketing's value is long-term awareness that should not be throttled to a single number. But the direction is set, and for the first time the measurement is there to follow it.

"The dashboards are so well laid out and usable that they're actually being used, which says a lot."

Mel Drummond, Strategy and Innovation, HECK!

From foundation to decision model

The roadmap builds on what is in place. Compare more media types to sharpen the decision model. Let the baseline mature so the real difference campaigns make can be measured cleanly. And make the most of an AI-ready foundation as HECK! runs bigger campaigns, where measurement becomes more critical still. BearTech continues as HECK!'s data partner through each phase.

"Don't rush the first bit, getting the data in and clean. If that goes wrong and you cut corners, it affects everything afterwards."

Mel Drummond, Strategy and Innovation, HECK!, on data transformation

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