Rob Markey at Bain has had an interesting career. He clearly has done a lot right. He is an advocate for the importance of marketing in the c-suite. As such it is welcome when he weighs in to support important ideas. In a 2020 piece in the Harvard Business Review he laid out a plan…
Search Results for: metrics
Lost For Good And Always A Share Markets
I found Barbara Bund Jackson’s book through a citation in an old article. The book seems to be now out of print. The book was published in 1985, so being out of print is understandable given it is a bit dated. The examples tend to be about what IBM did in the 60s and 70s…
Why B2B Pricing Is Interesting
This post will tell you why B2B pricing is interesting, at least to me. (B2B being business to business marketing). I’ll point to some useful advice. That said, the advice also illustrates the conceptual challenges with pricing in channels. The challenges are so significant that it is sometimes hard to keep clear what is being…
Adding Customers To Ratios
Marc Marshing has published a short book on using customer data in financial analysis. (I am assuming it was a dissertation or similar as it is closer to a paper than a traditional book). He talks about adding customers to ratios, specifically adding a measure of customer value to the price to book ratio. This…
Marketing Implications Of Financial Accounting
A book chapter I wrote with Jonathan Knowles and Moeen Butt has recently come out in the Review of Marketing Research (vol 18). In our chapter, we sought to give marketers a better understanding of accounting, specifically financial accounting. What then are the marketing implications of financial accounting? Keeping Score Marketers are trying to work…
NPS And Potential Customers
The Net Promoter Score/System (NPS) remains an outlier in marketing metrics. NPS is undoubtedly focused on ‘marketing’ issues but is very widely used across business. Senior managers often know NPS, indeed, they are often the ones promoting it. Is it any good though? The evidence for such a widely used metric is far from overwhelming….
Customer Accounting, Thanks But
It is great that accountants are looking at the idea of valuing a firm through its customers. I very much welcome this. That said, I do worry that people bringing ideas from outside their field often bring back bad habits with them. (To be clear I am sure I do this when looking at non-marketing…
Barriers To Implementing CLV
A lot of the early work on customer lifetime value (CLV) comes from the world of direct marketing. This makes sense given an obvious use of CLV is to manage a customer base. Using CLV you can help decide who to try and acquire, what your retention efforts should be, and who might be good…
The Origins Of Customer Equity
Customer equity is a concept that seems to have had its day in marketing. It arose, and it seems to me somewhat went away, relatively quickly. A 1996 article on the Harvard Business Review by Robert Blattberg and John Deighton lays out the idea of managing by a customer equity test. In many ways, this…
Understanding The Value Of Customers
Before CLV had become a big thing in marketing strategy Francis Mulhern looked at the challenge of understanding the value of customers. There are a lot of good points in the article. Measurement Problems In Understanding The Value Of Customers One of the most obvious challenges is that the data to allow us to understand…