Paul Magill and Christine Moorman shared a roadmap for marketing metrics in April’s Harvard Business Review. Their overarching aim is to elevate the way marketers look at metrics. The authors don’t want marketing assessed only at the campaign level — “did this ad campaign work?” Better to focus at higher levels, “what is marketing delivering…
Category: Key Performance Metrics
Not All Papers Must Feature Firm Performance
Today I’m discussing another paper that uses Total Q. I won’t spend too long on that. I have said plenty elsewhere about how bad Total Q is as a measure of firm performance. In this post, I want to somewhat sympathize with the authors of a paper that uses Total Q. I will tell a…
Belief In Mythical Numbers
The strategy setting process in any organization is always an interesting one. Given its centrality to the idea of managing an organization you might think people had the process down. You would be wrong. Vikas Mittal and Shridhari Sridhar look at the strategy setting process through extensive interviews and surveys. It isn’t always a pretty…
Are You Tyrannized By Metrics?
If you are tyrannized by metrics in this way I have just the book for you. Headline: “Tenured Professor Tyrannized By Metrics” Jerry Muller has a popular book — The Tyranny of Metrics. I have to say it is pretty bad. The problem is that it is a weak attempt to capitalize on concerns, some…
The Challenge of Not So Simple Marketing Performance Measures
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of marketing performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes. “[T]he movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from unidimensional to multidimensional measures of performance” (Clark, 1999, page 711). This raised the challenge…
Using Non-Financial Indicators
Using non-financial indicators to predict future profits. The problem of rewarding the right things Establishing the right reward structure is extremely challenging. O’Connell and O’Sullivan aim to help in this. They tackle the problem that traditional finance/accounting measures are quite backwards looking. (They can also be manipulated to reward those who prioritize short-term, over long-term,…
A Set of Metrics
The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) have produced a set of metrics to capture performance. I would like to improve the definitions. In addition, the set more coherently presented. (For example, why squish retention and acquisition together in the list below?) Still, it is an interesting view on what marketers think. CMA Task Force The process…
