A major challenge exists in sponsorships. They are typically long-term and don’t lead to immediate sales, so how can a marketer demonstrate value from sponsorships? MASB, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, tackles this problem in their new book — Sponsorship Accountability. Demonstrating Value From Sponsorships One of the challenges with sponsorship accountability is that there…
Category: Return on Investment (ROI)
The ROI Of Customers
I am pleased to report that we have a new paper in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. My coauthors — Paul Farris, Raj Venkatesan, and Andrew Petersen — and I looked at the challenge of assessing the ROI of customers. One problem we saw was that marketers were getting misleading ROIs (returns on investment) for…
The Right To Donate: A Critical View
Every now and then it’s useful to read something you have no clue what the author is talking about. I don’t mean you don’t understand the terminology or math. I mean you look at what they are saying, you register their meaning, and say, ‘huh?’ This is the reaction I got to Gordon Boyce’s ‘Valuing…
To Employ Marketing Metrics Consider User Needs
One the basic ideas in marketing is that the consumer of whatever you are providing decides whether an offering is useful. You shouldn’t just shout at your customers and tell them that they should appreciate what they are being given. I think a lot of marketers forget this basic idea when it comes to marketing…
Classifying Marketing Investments As Expenses
For this week and next I will look at an excellent book – Marketing Finance – by Keith Ward. He has taught at Cranfield amongst other places. (There are later editions with new co-authors — but reading different editions of the same book too close to each other is a bit too much even for…
Metrics that Marketers Muddle
From 2016: With Charan Bagga I have just published an article in the Sloan Management Review (see the article here). We called the article — rather self-explanatorily — Metrics that Marketers Muddle. Annoying Things That Marketers Do This central message is a bit cranky. Indeed we could have titled the paper, “annoying things that marketers do”. We highlight:…
Using Marketing Analytics
Two of my MBA professors, Paul Farris and Ron Wilcox, along with a newer Darden professor Raj Venkatesan, have a new book. This examines using marketing analytics through cases. (Raj also runs the marketing analytics initiative at Darden). Numbers-Based Marketing The cases describe scenarios relevant to numbers-based marketing. For example, they allow readers to see the…
Marketing ROI, Heartbeats And Breaths
Clarity is important to effective language use. If our words all mean different things it is hard to communicate. It is often surprising that marketers, who often claim to be communication experts, are sometimes terribly imprecise about what they mean. We need to be clear about marketing ROI, heartbeats, and breaths. Marketing ROI James Lenskold…
The Top and Bottom Line
Preparing for class recently I came across a media report which illustrates the confusion and sloppiness that surrounds marketing metrics. I realized the problem we often have talking about the top and bottom line. Impact Of Social Media An important question is the bottom line impact of social media. How can you persuade the CFO…
Spock And Kirk And Marketing
Rutherford and Knowles (2008) highlight the tensions between finance and marketing. Their book goes by the title of “Vulcans, Earthlings and Marketing ROI”. The central thesis being that finance people are steady and logical, Vulcan in Star Trek, while marketers exciting and emotional, Earthlings. What can they tell us about Spock and Kirk and Marketing?…
