As a follow up on our recent post about standardized marketing metrics, we explore the conversation as it progresses within the marketing community. Marketing NPV published an interesting article furthering the case for (and against) a standardized set of marketing metrics. In particular, they argue that CMOs should be spending more time asking a set of difficult, yet critical, questions about their marketing strategies and efforts then working to develop a standardized set of marketing metrics. One of the key parts of the article says:
If we are really most interested in accelerating the professionalism and economic value creation of the marketing discipline, we might have more impact more quickly by standardizing a set of QUESTIONS every marketer should be able to answer credibly. These might include:
1. What are the specific goals for our marketing spending and how should we expect to connect that spending to incremental revenue and/or margins?
2. What would be the short- and long-term impacts on revenue and margins if we spent 20% more/less on marketing overall in the next 12 months?
3. Compared to relevant benchmarks (historical, competitive, and marketplace), how effective are we at transforming marketing investments into profit growth?
4. What are appropriate targets for improving our marketing leverage (dollars of profit per dollar of marketing spend) in the next 1/3/5-year horizons, and what key initiatives are we counting on to get us there?
5. What are the priority questions we need to answer with respect to informing our knowledge of the payback on marketing investments, and what are we doing to close those knowledge gaps?
At Serfwerks, we agree that time spent asking critical questions about one’s own performance can be more fruitful to the organization seeking to improve its marketing results than pushing for a standardized set of marketing metrics.
More to come.
