‘Is Your Marketing Profitable?’

Is your marketing profitable? A straight-forward question, you might think. But, then again maybe not - perhaps it takes 552 pages written by an eminent professor to illuminate the payback from marketing.  Well, read the review of A review of ‘Marketing Payback’ by Robert Shaw and David Merrick to find out.

The authors tell us that such words as; ‘unaccountable’, ‘untouchable’, ‘expensive’ and ‘slippery’ are commonly used to describe marketing. This grim reality is certain to upset any marketing professional.

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing has been on the agenda for some time. However, when Phillip Kotler - a name known to almost every student of marketing for over quarter of a century - puts his endorsement on the cover of a book about marketing's payback you know the idea is about to become mainstream....

...read the book review.

Think twice before admitting that half your marketing is wasted!

Many managers joke that half their marketing is wasted, they just don't know which half.  In reality however if half your marketing is wasted you are only half doing your job.  

Imagine a factory manager admitting that only half of what was produced worked, or an accountant saying that only half of the company's accounts were accurate.  They would quickly be out of a job!  So why should marketing be different.  

Yes, marketing can be a little hard to measure, but not impossible.  In particular the trend from traditional mass marketing to one to one contact with buyers and decision makers have enabled a revolution.  We call it Sales-Led Marketing - it is the approach employed by those companies who accelerate sales growth.

Everyday we listen to sales managers and their teams side-swipe at marketing, either for the quality of leads, the accuracy of lists or the effectiveness of sales collateral.  Sales led marketing is an end to the 'them and us' approach that has existed for too long.