Customer Reviews

Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master

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Obviously, it is highly desirable to measure what matters and that is especially true of marketing initiatives. Here's the challenge which many (most?) readers will face after they finish reading this volume: Which metrics are the most appropriate for their specific organization? Co-authors Paul W. Farris, Neil T. Bendle, Phillip E. Pfeifer, and David J. Reibstein offer 50+ and in an ideal business world, every executive can - and will - master all of them. That is possible but highly unlikely. Fortunately, the authors offer a wealth of information and observations that can guide and inform the selection of those metrics that will enable executives to "gather and analyze basic market data, measure the core factors that drive their business models, analyze the profitability of individual customer accounts, and optimize resource allocation among increasingly fragmented media.

To the authors' substantial credit, they make effective use of a number of reader-friendly devices which enliven what would be an otherwise dull textbook and they do without compromising the integrity of research-driven insights which so many books on marketing lack. These devices include definitions, formulas, and brief descriptions of various metrics. They also include within individual chapters several sections, such as "Construction" (e.g. metrics issues concerning their formulation, application, interpretation, and strategic ramifications), "Data Sources, "Complications, and Cautions" (i.e. an analysis of the limitations of the metrics under consideration, and their potential inadequacies once executed), and "Related Metrics and Concepts" (briefly surveyed). This is by no means an "easy read" but will generously reward those who absorb and digest its material with appropriate rigor.

Although I believe this volume can be of substantial value to executives in almost all organizations (regardless of size or nature), I think it will be of greatest benefit to those - probably in larger companies -- who have an urgent need for accurate and consistent measurement of, for example, the dynamics behind their market share; the profitability of producing, pricing, selling, distributing, and servicing what they offer; and the ROI of marketing initiatives within the framework of enterprise financial metrics.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson as well as Ram Charan's Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't, Lynda Gratton's Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy - And Others Don't, Robert J. Herbold's Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning, Jack Alexander's Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation, and Michael Useem's The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It.

Personally, I love these kinds of handbooks. Having a ready resource for these dozens of metrics can help any executive understand their business and think about ways to compete in the marketplace in new ways. Too often marketing is thought of in terms of advertising and sales, but it is so much more than that. Marketing is everything your company does or needs to do to choosing a marketplace, the products to compete with, how to promote and sell them, and how to better understand your market, your competition, and how it is changing over time.

This excellent book has eleven chapters. The first provides an introduction to the book, its layout and purpose. The last chapter takes you through what the authors call the marketing x-ray. It explains the practical aspects of the ratios provided and how they can reveal things about apparently healthy companies that can help you make changes before it is too late, just as an x-ray can alert you to a health problem before things become dire.

The other nine chapters take the reader through various business ratios for measuring your share of the hears, minds, and markets of your customers, margins and profits, product and portfolio management, customer profitability, sales force and channel management, pricing strategy, promotion, advertising media and web metrics, and marketing and finance.

What is good about working through these metrics is that you will be asking yourself questions that you need to ask. Even if the metric doesn't apply to your specific situation, finding out that it doesn't will help you think more clearly about your situation. You may find that some of them will help you think through things that are important to your business with a new perspective. Some of the data for the metrics is hard to come by, and thinking that through will help you think about your business in a more focused way because your assumptions will have to be more explicitly made rather than the kind of vague impressions we too often let suffice for thinking about our business.

This book is an excellent resource and all executives responsible for the way their business competes in the marketplace should have this book. I believe there are also seminars being offered that teach the metrics on this book. While I have no idea of their quality, they do sound interesting for the right audience.

As the former chief marketing officer of a major engineering services firm (0ver 3,000 employees), I wish I could have had the benefit of having read Marketing Metrics -- first.

My strategic marketing group was more anecdotal than strategic. While they did the best that they could with the resources they had, anecdotal data is just that.

The principles found in Chapter 5, "Customer Profitability," could have enabled the strategic marketing group to more accurately measure our effectiveness in delivering value-added services to our many customers. Other sections of the book, particularly Chapter 6, could have had equal applicability in other facets of our analytical work.

With the material found in this book, our strategic future in a fast changing marketplace could have been plotted with far greater discipline.

The book would have made my strategic marketing group truly strategic.

In conclusion, I believe that the detailed, yet easy to read, Marketing Metrics is as applicable (and necessary) in a service industry as it is in a product environment.

A metric is a form of measurement, which can be used to determine the level of success or failure. However, in anything more complex than the counting of points, it is possible to measure more than one thing and often more than one interpretation is possible. Therefore, when choosing to create and use any type of measuring tool, you not only must select the right one, know how to use it, how much to use it you also must understand how to interpret the results. Embedded in this is also the sometimes even more important adage of knowing when not to use a measuring tool.
Marketing is one of the main pillars of any successful company, yet is often the most difficult one to manage. Determining the cost of a marketing plan is easy, but selecting one that will work and determining how well it worked are both very hard. So hard that many companies really have little idea how well they are doing in these areas.
This book will help you solve all that, as the title suggests, many different ways in which marketing effectiveness can be measured are given. They are split into the following categories:

*) Share of hearts and minds
*) Margins and profits
*) Product and portfolio management
*) Customer profitability
*) Sales force and channel management
*) Pricing strategy
*) Promotion
*) Advertising media and web metrics
*) Marketing and finance
*) The marketing metrics x-ray

This is not a book where the author(s) simply spout theoretical jargon, quantitative terms and formulas are used everywhere. Furthermore, the terms are explained in great detail and in terminology that can be understood by anyone with the intelligence to be in management.
In the modern business world, every department must not only pull their own weight, they also must be able to argue their points and be able to back up their claims with hard data. Marketing is often thought of as an area where the decibel level of the wind is more important than the sounds and the direction. This book will help keep you from being the target of such accusations.

This is not a book to read in a old fashion way. This is research material.

There is a lot of important information and concepts in it to be lost if readed as a regular book. Teachers, students and marketing professionals should use them to imporve their work. Looking for some concept and performance measure.

In a world that performance is the key for every thing, this book will help to develop the right group of indicators to measure your business or academic research.

I always keep mine close.

The text is wel organised, with easy to understand examples for each metric. It is very much centered on the off-line side of the business (only one Chapter focsued on Advertising Media and Web Metrics). Preferably in the next edition, the authors should concentrate more on providing more integrated examples of online to offline metrics from online & mobile industry. Otherwise an excelent book which should be used (at least as reference material) by any serious marketer.

This is an essential guide for businesses of all sizes. The authors suggest metrics for many important marketing outcomes that aren't necessarily measured as accurately or as often as they should be. Willingness to recommend, cannibalization rate, out of stock percentage, direct product profitability, cost per customer acquired, return on marketing investment--they're all here, plus dozens of other key metrics.

Not only do the authors explain in clear language exactly what to measure and why these metrics matter, they show how to make each calculation. Buy this and keep it close at hand, especially when you're putting together your marketing plans for next year.

Marketing has historically been the most nebulous of business skills at least compared to the more easily quantifiable metrics around sales and operations. However, current economic conditions make success metrics and measurements necessary in order to understand the impact of marketing on business profitability. That's why this book proves invaluable to not only marketing students but any marketing leader looking to assess the effectiveness of strategies and instill a culture of accountability. This macro-level shift ultimately reinforces marketing within a company's value propositions, but for many executives, it also means drastic changes in current reporting methods that could be met with some resistance.

This collaborative effort by four academics - Paul W. Farris and Phillip E. Pfeifer, both professors from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, along with Wharton Professor David J. Reibstein and University of Minnesota Ph.D. marketing student Neil T. Bendle - is an impressive accumulation of research showing how much information is available within a company to develop what they call a "dashboard" of potentially powerful marketing metrics. The concepts are hardly complicated as they can be calculated in a straightforward fashion, and of greater importance, the co-authors have specifically applied real-life examples to make each metric feel more tangible to the reader. Moreover, the co-authors understand how marketing is being audited to a far greater degree these days as a means toward predicting and influencing the mix of investments necessary to make business forecasts.

Fluency in such metrics will be essential, and future marketing leaders will not succeed without them. Toward that end, a wide range of measurements is covered here encompassing traditional marketing activities such as promotional strategy, advertising, and distribution. The co-authors then broaden their perspective to quantify customer perceptions, market share and assessing the success of the competition. Marketing metrics are subsequently coalesced with accepted financial measurements such as margins and profits, customer profitability and pricing strategies. Knowing the pros and cons of each metric, especially how and when to apply it, is critical. The book includes a comprehensive discussion of timing and tradeoffs for maximum effectiveness. Even further, in the most valuable section of the book, they demonstrate how to use marketing metrics as a means toward identifying new marketing opportunities. This is an essential resource for any marketing leader, current or aspiring.

This is a good fundamental description of different marketing measurments. These metrics used to be taught to people in the business as they worked their way up the ranks. Unfortunately, today there is virtually no marketing training being done at most organizations. This book can help those people who want to know how to look at a marketing from a more analytical basis and do a better job at managing the marketing for their company. I have already given it to two clients to help them do their job better.

A vade mecum is a handbook intended to provide ready reference. This is it. Its perfect, clear, well organized, easy to read, easy to find what you're looking for. I'm in the marketing industry and it's perfect. It's a 'must read for my team members and also a must have for any marketing decision maker.