The publication touts the 100 most creative business people

It is only responsible for Fast Company to publish an article about a CMO’s balancing of creativity and analytics in its most recent issue featuring the top 100 creative people in business. After all, Serfwerks has been touting the need for using data and analytics to drive the creative process (see Unbounded Creativity parts I and II) in marketing since its founding. We’ve seen too many cool and creative ideas and approaches to marketing flounder when it comes to what matters most to business—driving bottom line results. Continue reading →

A recent article in the Journal of Marketing (vol. 72) by Krasnikov et. al. finds a stronger correlation between marketing capabilities and firm performance (r = .35) than those for both R&D (r = .28) and operations (r = .21). The managerial implication is that “increase in marketing capability is associated with stronger improvement in firm performance than increases in operations capability and R&D capability (Hanssens, D, ed., 2009, Empirical Generalizations about Marketing Impact, p. 3).

Check out the article: Relative Impact of Marketing on Firm Performance

About Correlation (r)
Correlation is a statistical measurement that determines the “goodness of fit” of a relationship between two variables. It does not determine cause. Correlation is measured on a scale from 1 to -1. The closer the “r” score is to 1, the more positive the correlation is between the two variables. The closer the “r” score is to -1, the more negative the correlation is between the two variables. The closer the “r” score is to zero, the less correlation exists between the two variables.

Last week, Marketing Profs published an insightful article by Banks and Nahama calling for the standardization of marketing metrics. Banks and Nahama wrote the following:

We are chagrined to see marketers still putting forth hundreds, even thousands, of disparate measures for their specialized fields, with most of them stopping short of linking to financial return.

It saps years of progress from the marketing discipline to hear marketing specialists, many at the top of their field, still make passionate arguments that it’s all about viewers or listeners or impressions or eyeballs or click-through or brand or awareness or pass-along or engagement, etc.

That trend seems only to be accelerating in the age of digital and social marketing.

These thousands of measurements may have use for daily activity, but when they attract such, well, un-standardized attention, they hurt marketing and they distract CMOs from their main tasks.
Continue reading →