- 1.1 What Is a Metric?
- 1.2 Why Do You Need Metrics?
- 1.3 Marketing Metrics: Opportunities, Performance, and Accountability
- 1.4 Choosing the Right Numbers
- 1.5 Mastering Metrics
- 1.6 Marketing Metrics Survey
1.3 Marketing Metrics: Opportunities, Performance, and Accountability
Marketers are by no means immune to the drive toward quantitative planning and evaluation. Marketing may once have been regarded as more an art than a science. Executives may once have cheerfully admitted that they knew they wasted half the money they spent on advertising, but they didn't know which half. Those days, however, are gone.
Today, marketers must understand their addressable markets quantitatively. They must measure new opportunities and the investment needed to realize them. Marketers must quantify the value of products, customers, and distribution channels—all under various pricing and promotional scenarios. Increasingly, marketers are held accountable for the financial ramifications of their decisions. Observers have noted this trend in graphic terms:
- "For years, corporate marketers have walked into budget meetings like neighborhood junkies. They couldn't always justify how well they spent past handouts or what difference it all made. They just wanted more money—for flashy TV ads, for big-ticket events, for, you know, getting out the message and building up the brand. But those heady days of blind budget increases are fast being replaced with a new mantra: measurement and accountability."5