People love appearing to have knowledge. Often they are less careful about working out whether what they are saying makes sense. A concern I have is that we often claim to know much more than we actually know. We have some hunches or ideas and these gain the status of facts in our minds. Clearly this influences…
Author: neilbendle
Neil is an Associate Professor Marketing at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He investigates the measurement of marketing performance, the accounting/marketing interface, and the impact of non-standard decision making in commercial and political markets.
Neil is the Chair of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board advisors. He is co-author of Marketing Metrics: The Manager’s Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance (3rd edition) Wharton School Press and is co-author of a cartoon book: Behavioural Economics for Kids.
Marketing Accounts For Managers
Xin Wang and I published a piece in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. We called the article Marketing Accounts. This discusses marketing accounts for managers. The full text of this research article is available free of charge. See the link below. (We would like to thank SSHRC/the Canadian government for this. They provided…
Measuring The Impact Of Marketing On Wall Street
Bernd Skiera, and a couple of colleagues, have a paper that considers a relatively recent wave of research in marketing academia. They tackle event studies. These look at the impact of specified “events” on the value of a firm. Measuring the impact of marketing on Wall Street. Marketing Events Clearly marketers tend to concentrate on marketing events….
More On CLV: A Lot Of Bad Advice Out There
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is widely discussed in marketing. Unfortunately, given marketers rarely refer to anyone else’s ideas this just leads to lots of people having their own view. This means when one looks up CLV online you are very likely to get a view of the metric that may, or may not, make sense. You want more on…
Reference Group Neglect: Don’t Gamble With Gamblers
The problem of why entrepreneurs start up companies is an interesting one. Many fail but it doesn’t seem to put new ones off. Colin Camerer and Dan Lovallo examined a possible reason for this. (They examine it in a lab so can’t give definitive answers but it is still interesting.) The authors use a small game…
Accounting For Brands
In a 2003 piece Tony McAuley discussed the history of accounting for intangible values. He interviewed Michael Schurch, CFO of RHM (Rank Hovis McDougall). They discussed the company’s decision to add the value of brands to the balance sheet back in 1988. This created a bit of a stir at the time, and has influenced accounting for…
Accounting For Marketing
Accounting for marketing deserves more consideration. Neither accountants nor marketers seem to give it much thought. That is a shame. It is a key area for understanding business. Yet, few are experts in it. Accounting For Marketing I think that there is a desperate need for marketers to understand accounting. Indeed, I think a lot…
Food Lessons From An Economist
Tyler Cowen’s “An Economist Gets Lunch” is pretty self-indulgent. In this book we get food lessons from an economist. Self-Indulgence Firstly, Cowen really loves his food and is happy to share his enthusiasm for high-quality meals. The second sense of self-indulgence is of an academic doing what he loves. I don’t mean to imply this negatively. When people do…
Improving Public Policy With Better Assumptions
Katie Chen (then at Western), Dilip Soman (of Rotman), and myself published a whitepaper. (I wrote this in 2017 and have edited since). This was through BEAR at the University of Toronto. We discussed moves towards improving public policy with better assumptions. Specifically the ideas about human behavior used in models. (More empiricially valid models in academic terms). By…
The Tyranny Of Random Facts
BCG have a new piece on measuring marketing results: Making Sense of the Marketing Measurement Mess. There is a lot to like in it. They discuss the tyranny of random facts. Questions To Ask About Marketing Metrics The authors describe a number of questions to ask about marketing metrics. “Do the metrics and tools capture…
