Management doesn’t value marketing

According to a study cited in this article over at Marketing Week, 73% of CEOs believe that marketers “lack business credibility because they fail to quantify the success of their campaigns”. It goes on further to state that: “marketers focus too much on the ‘arty and fluffy’ side of marketing and not enough on its business science”.

Putting a hard number on the value of a marketing campaign is an ongoing struggle for many marketers. It requires a complete view of the customer, something that marketers may not have access to. Imagine a marketing campaign for a bank that leverages banner advertising, call center and direct mail with the goal of increasing product holdings among existing customers. Management rightfully wants to understand the business value created through this campaign.

To begin to answer this question, you’ll need a complete view of the customer, both before and after the after the life of the campaign. This complete view includes all customer interactions along with all other customer attributes. What banners was the customer exposed to? How many did she click on? Was she targeted for with direct mail? How did she respond? What are her total account holdings before and after the campaign? And so on.

Without this view it’s almost impossible to understand the cause of changes in product holdings because you’ll only be analyzing part of the story. This leads to approximations that can be divorced from business reality. Marketers are often forced into approximations because some number is considered better than no number at all. But this can lead to a big problem: When marketers report numbers that fail to align with financial statements, distrust of marketing grows.

Developing a complete view of the customer is a necessary condition to truly understand the success or failure of marketing campaigns. Marketers are going to continue to have trouble understanding the value they’re creating without it. And without understanding the true value they’re creating, business credibility may continue to elude them.