While it’s looking like 2012 might be a better year for business than 2011, it’s still essential that marketers focus on ways to ferret out waste and inefficiency in operations – both to minimize the impact on corporate bottom lines, but also to remain flexible for the new channels and investments that are sure to pop up in the coming 12 months.

And so, we measure everything – campaign effectiveness, brand investments, even the internal operations of the marketing function. But a marketing organization is a complex organism, and can be measured in an infinite number of ways – ways that might be contradictory or misleading.

Unsurprisingly, MLC members have come up with a number of ways to measure marketing’s effectiveness. Here are a few of our most popular strategies:

Measure adherence to the brand promise. Large organizations face inherent difficulties in consistently delivering on ambitious brand promises, and FedEx was no different; performance to brand promise was wildly inconsistent across channels and geographies.

In response, the company created a scorecard that boiled down the brand promise into discrete employee behaviors, incenting the front line to comply in the process. MLC members, read the full case here.

Measure marketing’s contribution to firm financial performance. This one can be difficult to figure out – it’s hard to determine, with any sort of certainty, which marketing activities have led to which performance benchmarks at the corporate level.

Xerox moved to this model after years of throwing large volumes of performance data at senior decision-makers. They used a lean Six Sigma process to arrive at a manageable number of insightful metrics aligned with broader firm performance, leading to higher levels of senior-staff buy-in. MLC members, read the full case here.

Measure marketing’s contribution to firm goals. We highlighted this case in this week’s post on sustainable brand growth, but it also explains a key insight into what Marketing should prioritize when it comes to effectiveness measurement. Given the somewhat ambiguous nature of marketing, it’s key that senior folks buy in – and most often, getting buy-in is contingent upon answering the question “What have you done for me lately?”.

One MLC member solved this problem by creating a purpose-built dashboard that shows exactly how marketing and branding initiatives align with and contribute to corporate goals. MLC members can see the whole case here. We’ve also blogged about this case.

Business decisions didn’t used to be numbers-based, but now the pendulum is swinging to “In God we trust, all others bring data”, for good reason.  One of the best analogies I’ve heard is that a company built on analytics is like an animal while a company with no analytics is like a plant. Analytics enables the former to respond dynamically to opportunities and dangers while the latter can only sit and wait hoping that nothing bad happens. Back when everyone is a plant (i.e. not analytical), you’re probably fine being the neighboring tuft, but the day one of them turns into a cow (i.e. becomes analytical), well, good luck.

This evolution is to a great extent accelerated by the proliferation of consumer data and the many good things you can get out of it. While you can certainly observe customers in store (people still do), it is infinitely more scalable to use web mining to “observe” thousands perusing the net, estimate what stage they are at in their purchase process and tailor your messages accordingly. Few would have heard of Signet Banking Corp but many are familiar with its spin-off Capital One, the 8^th largest bank in the country – and one that was built to a great extent on the strength of analytics.

But just like anything with massive impact, analytics can also go massively wrong and the failure very often has less to do with the tool itself than with the one wielding it. The only thing worse than no data is bad data, and the only thing worse than bad data is bad interpretations. Here’s how you go down that slippery slope and how you can climb back up: Read More »

As we continue to issue-sense around emerging research topics for the coming year, one thing comes up again and again: the role of data in marketing strategy. The members we’ve talked to understand that the vast amounts of data collected on customers has enormous potential for driving commercial results and delivering insightful and useful experiences, but simply having the data isn’t enough – how do we get from having it to putting it to good use?

This quarter’s Executive Guidance - a series of leadership studies put out by the whole of CEB, representing a cross-functional consensus on emerging management topics – is called “Overcoming the Insight Deficit”, and it’s all about putting Big Data to big use. We found that even as companies invest tens of millions of dollars in data and analytics, less than 40% of employees have the ability to take advantage of those investments. The report’s focus is on developing individual and organizational capabilities that make the technical investments worthwhile.

Want to learn more? You can download the report here.

By Ana Lapter

Effective touchpoint planning is based on marketers’ ability to turn insight into consumer-facing initiatives.  This is not easy thing to accomplish.  MLC research reveals that 96% of marketing organizations are largely unsatisfied with their ability to convert consumer understanding into an effective planning exercise.  One major reason is marketer reluctance to get out of the comfort zone of planning campaigns around favorite channels.  For many packaged goods companies, the dominating channel is TV.  In other industries, it might be direct mail or other forms of promotional channels.

Here are three tactics for jarring your team out of its favored touchpoint comfort zone: Read More »

It’s an experience we’ve heard from hundreds of marketers in countless subdisciplines: they have a great, disruptive idea, an actionable plan to get there, a receptive audience with money to spend, and internal enthusiasm for getting something done.

Then comes the dreaded question: what’s the projected ROI? And instantly, all the air gets sucked out of the room or e-mail thread – and the great idea is never to be heard from again. Because for any idea that’s even remotely risky or disruptive, guessing the projected ROI is largely a fantasy, right up there with unicorns, leprechauns and a working office printer. (IT folks – I keed, I keed)

So when Phillips’ Oral Healthcare, makers of the Sonicare electric toothbrush line, faced a mandate to double their rate of growth, they knew they had to find a way to neutralize the ROI question from the beginning. The result was the company’s Segment-Focused Innovation Roadmap, part of our revamped Product Management topic center. Read More »

Consider the following two vignettes:

• In the book “Winning,” Jack Welch describes a tactic he used at GE to force himself to always enter a business situation with a fresh perspective.  Every time he travelled, he got off the plane imagining that the Jack Welch of yesterday had had no idea what he had been doing.  He felt that this ritual of taking a critical eye to past decisions helped him enter every situation as an opportunity for improvement.

• In a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Laura J. Soave, a marketing executive at Fiat discussed details of Fiat’s ‘Return to North America’ marketing launch, adding that “My ultimate goal would be not to spend one dollar in traditional advertising.”  Instead, she says that she will focus on social media and other grassroots approaches to target likely buyers.

Now, consider the following:  If you were starting the marketing function within your business today, how would you choose to allocate your media mix?  In other words, if you had a zero-based planning process (rather than one based on the previous year’s plans), what would you choose to spend your money on? Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

(Note: This is Part 2 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

B2B marketing organizations today are emphasizing the transfer of ideas to customers (just consider the rise of terms like “thought leadership”, “consultative selling” or “solutions”).  This makes sense – done right, an insight-based approach is one of the few ways suppliers can avert pure price-based competition. Additionally, our research shows that insight is valued by customers in the long term.  “Teaching” activities such as offering unique perspectives on the market or helping the customer navigate alternatives strongly predict loyalty.

It follows that marketing plans this year should have a strong insight orientation.  Naturally the marketing plan will align to broader organizational strategy, but the marketing objectives that support company strategy should be grounded in delivering insight that changes customers’ valuation of your offering. Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know? Read More »

The post title is cheeky, yes; but this one incredibly true. The more we see members implementing a social media strategy, the wider the gap grows between success and failure – and along with that, the attendant risks of failure. For those looking simply to make the social media case, failure means another year lost while consumers and technology forge ahead. For those making social media a central part of the customer experience, failure means massive personnel costs that could have been spent on tried-and-true techniques. So without further ado, the top ten list: Read More »

Plenty of Council members are asking us questions about social media ROI.  As our research team scans all that’s been written on the topic, we occasionally come across little gems.  One that may have escaped your attention is a section of a larger 2007 study, Never Ending Friending, which may provide some valuable rules of thumb and benchmarks for those of you diving into social media ROI.

The study was commissioned by MySpace which, at the time, was on the top of the social networking heap.  You’ll likely want to skip the first 34 pages (unless you have a keen interest in MySpace circa 2007), and get right to the meat.  Read More »