Editorial

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Marketing accountability is essential for sustained organic growth, but the challenges to it loom large. The major steps in truly accountable marketing include defining the right results, using the right metrics and finally acting upon the collected insights. To identify the right metrics one has to start with defining the right results: What is the informed decision that needs to be made? But getting data-based answers to key questions is only half the battle. Actually acting upon it is the other half, and often companies are reluctant to change. To create momentum, marketing and finance need to pull together, and the selected metrics need to be useful to both mind-sets. Other proven ways to overcome resistance to data-based recommendations include moving to the proposed optimal allocation gradually and demonstrating the real-word gains through field experiments. When companies succeed in establishing truly accountable marketing, they improve and simplify recurring and quantifiable decisions, which leaves them more time to scan the environment for new opportunities and allows them to take smarter risks.
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Truly Accountable Marketing: The Right Metrics for the Right Results

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Companies can either strive for organic growth or growth through acquisitions. For marketing the first option is more attractive because it relates directly to its core responsibilities. Further, organic growth increases the market value of companies, whereas acquisitions often fall back on such expectations.
The main opportunities for organic growth lie in new products, brand building, customer management and channel innovation. There are many sources of growth ideas and multiple paths toward organic revenue goals. The key is to generate a large number of ideas and then select the most promising among them. While the most obvious one is technology development, there are other useful approaches, as well, such as observing or asking consumers, co-creation projects or approaching ideation systematically.
But even good ideas with initial support from all relevant parties can fail. For a growth initiative to succeed, all stakeholders need to be considered. The outcomes need to be positive to all relevant parties both inside and outside the firm.

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Marketing and Organic Revenue Growth

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Unlike a couple of decades ago, today the majority of a firm’s value is in intangible assets. Marketing carries the primary responsibility for most of these intangible. Therefore, it is imperative to understand how marketing expenditures are linked to these intangible assets and that increasing the value of intangible assets is in the interest of both marketing and finance.
It is not always easy to demonstrate this link, and many marketing departments still struggle to prove the financial returns of their activities. Too often marketers rely on typical marketing metrics, like awareness or preferences, whereas finance is more concerned about market results like profit, cash flow or EBITDA. Rather than letting marketing budgets be cut during economic downturns, marketing managers should learn to show the value marketing brings to the firm. The key for marketers is learning to speak the financial language of the firm and helping train the rest of the organization to understand the longer-term financial assets resulting from marketing.

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Closing the Gap between Marketing and Finance: The Link to Driving Wise Marketing Investment

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Including mind-set metrics like cognitions, affects and intentions in marketing models helps explain the effect of marketing on hard facts like sales and profit and also improves marketing decisions. Mind-set metrics have longer wear-in times than most marketing mix activities and can therefore serve as leading indicators. They allow time for managerial action before market performance itself is affected.
The mind-set effects are not identical for all types of products or in all marketing settings. Four criteria – potential, responsiveness, stickiness and sales conversion – help determine and make clear the connection between marketing actions, attitudinal metrics and sales outcomes for different product types and brands. These criteria can also be used in prediction models and to determine the optimal budget for individual marketing activities.
The joint modeling of mind-set metrics, marketing mix actions and financial outcomes are relevant and helpful to CMOs and CFOs alike. Such information enables marketing managers to understand the effect of marketing actions while offering financial accountability of marketing to CFOs.

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Mind-Set Metrics: Consumer Attitudes and the Bottom Line

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In integrated marketing, the effectiveness of each activity depends upon all other branding activities when synergies are sought. Synergies arise from each of the following four areas: combining different media types, scheduling their inphase or out-phase timing, using consistent formal designs and creating integrated content across media types. Using a proper mix of multiple media and synchronizing their spending patterns over time are more important than creating and designing advertising content when generating media synergies. In some cases, the effectiveness of one medium increases because of repetition of the brand’s message in a different medium. In other cases, synergies occur because the target segment gets to read, understand and elaborate on the advertised content, thereby reinforcing the brand’s message.
Synergies not only influence the effectiveness of advertising but also the budgeting. As synergy increases, the optimal total media budget increases, as well, and the proportion of the media budget allocated to the more effective medium decreases, while that allocated to the less effective medium increases. Sometimes the effects of synergies are surprising, and individual activities need to be seen in a completely different light when combined with others. Managers are welladvised to monitor synergies of their activities and reflect them in their budgets.

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Professor of Marketing, Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis, U.S.A.

Professor of Marketing, Business School, University of Hamburg, Germany, Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing, GSM, University of California, Davis, U.S.A.

True Synergy for Real Effects: How to Control Integrated Marketing Successfully

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While some marketing tactics such as price promotions have mostly short-term effects, others such as advertising have both a short- and a long-term impact. A short-term focus in advertising measurement may bias return-on-investment calculations because it takes into account the complete expenditure for advertising but only a portion of its impact. Therefore it is necessary to assess advertising’s long-term impact on top of its short-term effects.
Sustained advertising effect arises from consumer response in terms of carry-over effects or purchase reinforcement like repeat buying or word of mouth. It also depends on corporate behavior like a company’s ability to learn from past experiences.A precondition to leveraging optimal short- and longterm advertising effects is to monitor success and infer theright action.The improvement in an organization’s marketing processes and behaviors can result in an impact that is over five times stronger and longer lasting. To produce such results, the organization must use consumer response metrics to advertising that are predictive of transactional and financial returns, spend on activities that create the short-term effects necessary for long-term build-up, repeat successful behavior and turn this feedback loop into better business practices and improved process management for both the brand and for the company as a whole.

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Keeps Working and Working and Working … The Long-Term Impact of Advertising

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Even if you measure a lot, you can’t measure everything. Be it for a lack of available data, for instance, in some developing countries or be it because you just have to draw a line at somepoint. The art of using the collected data for making marketing truly accountable lies, according to Nick Chesterton, in knowing what individual metrics really mean and using the gained insights in subsequent processes. Follow Unilever on its path from metrics to action.
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From Metrics to Action - Interview with Nicholas Chesterton, Unilever

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The methods of measuring market success and advertising effect are already quite sophisticated and precise compared to the early age of mass advertising, but identifying cause and effect in the world of marketing is still a challenge. There are so many influential factors, and more and more ommunication channels are becoming available for addressing consumers and promoting one’s brand. So how does good old TV advertising stack up in this environment? Has it become obsolete in the age of social media? Does it belong to the half of the advertising that does not work? If you consider both the short- and longterm effects, the answer is an unequivocal no. That was the result of the calculations of a model developed by Seven One Media, GfK Fundamental Research of GfK Verein and GfK TV Audience Research for determining the return on investment (ROI) of TV advertising.
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Managing Director and Vice President of GfK Verein and Professor of Business Administration and Statistics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg,

Managing Director of Seven One Media, Munich,

The Long-Term ROI of TV Advertising in a Digital World

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 16 (2024): Issue 1 (May 2024) Generative AI – Reshaping the Marketing Landscape

Volume 15 (2023): Issue 2 (November 2023) Virtual Consumer Experiences

Volume 15 (2023): Issue 1 (May 2023) Marketing Dashboards – The Next Generation

Volume 14 (2022): Issue 2 (November 2022) MarTech and SalesTech

Volume 14 (2022): Issue 1 (May 2022) Conscious Consumption

Volume 13 (2021): Issue 2 (November 2021) Brand Activism

Volume 13 (2021): Issue 1 (May 2021) The Dark Sides of Digital Marketing

Volume 12 (2020): Issue 2 (November 2020) The Reputation Economy

Volume 12 (2020): Issue 1 (May 2020) Crowd Innovation: Hype or Help

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 2 (November 2019) AI and the Machine Age of Marketing

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 1 (May 2019) The Future of Retailing

Volume 10 (2018): Issue 2 (October 2018) IoT - Consumers and the Internet of Things

Volume 10 (2018): Issue 1 (May 2018) Brand Risk Matters

Volume 9 (2017): Issue 2 (November 2017) The Connected Consumer

Volume 9 (2017): Issue 1 (May 2017) Digital Transformation

Volume 8 (2016): Issue 2 (November 2016) Marketing and Data Science

Volume 8 (2016): Issue 1 (May 2016) Responsible Marketing

Volume 7 (2015): Issue 2 (November 2015) Marketing Meets Product Design

Volume 7 (2015): Issue 1 (May 2015) Truly Accountable Marketing

Volume 6 (2014): Issue 2 (November 2014) Social Brand Engagement

Volume 6 (2014): Issue 1 (May 2014) Emotions in Marketing

Volume 5 (2013): Issue 2 (November 2013)

Volume 5 (2013): Issue 1 (May 2013)

Volume 4 (2012): Issue 2 (November 2012)

Volume 4 (2012): Issue 1 (May 2012)

Volume 3 (2011): Issue 2 (November 2011)

Volume 3 (2011): Issue 1 (May 2011)

Volume 2 (2010): Issue 2 (November 2010)

Volume 2 (2010): Issue 1 (May 2010)

Volume 1 (2009): Issue 2 (November 2009)

Volume 1 (2009): Issue 1 (May 2009)

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Volume 7 (2015): Issue 1 (May 2015) - Truly Accountable Marketing