Making Marketing Accountable |
Twelve characteristics to provide standards and metrics
that create accountability for marketing decisions.
A central problem in business today is that marketing
lacks the kind of accountability and metrics common to
the rest of the corporation. While manufacturing and
service organizations can quantify their costs down to a
fraction of a penny and project their return on
investments, marketing remains a corporate “dark
science,” in which marketing practitioners can generate
desirable results, but cannot tell you how they achieved
them.
The problem of measuring marketing’s effectiveness
and efficiency is profound: unlike other segments of the
corporation, in which the language is unequivocally tied
to the language of finance, marketing has no common
units of measurement. It is not that marketing
professionals cannot agree on whether to use yards or
meters; they cannot agree on whether they are trying to
measure volume, distance, or some other third- or
fourth-dimensional characteristic. 2006 |