Like everyone else in this wide wired world I spend a lot of time reading marketing blogs. Now I realize that reading marketing blogs is, to paraphrase the comedian Lewis Black, like videotaping yourself spewing about marketing in front of a mirror so later you can spew about marketing while watching the video (he didn't say "marketing" but something very close to marketing), but I do it anyway. It gives my boss something to hold against me at evaluation time.
Okay, so yesterday I was reading something that came through the marvelous life-giving portal known as adage.com which stated that marketers now have so many things they can measure to prove ROI that they can't prove ROI because they can't figure out which numbers are meaningful.
Well, whaddya know? Here’s the very quote:
"’What's making everything much more murky is the amount of data that's available today,’ said media consultant Erwin Ephron. ‘It just blows the mind. It's very hard to think constructively about media planning when you have 500 different research sources telling you what's going on, because you can prove anything you want. We need to get back to a simple set of measurements that in fact identify response.’”
And furthermore, “A fundamental problem across all metrics is settling for what actually can be measured rather than measuring what actually contributes to the ultimate goal: sales, Mr. Ephron said.”
Hear that? That's the sound of the pendulum swinging the other way.
You knew this was going to happen. You knew that the rise of Barack Obama would spawn the anti-Obama(s), you knew the NBA would jerry-rig the free-enterprise system until it resembled Baksheesh Sunday in Monrovia so that three of its biggest superstars would wind up on the gateway team to the largest international market in the Western Hemisphere, and you knew, you just knew that as soon as a marketing universe was created where everything could be measured someone would come along and say that none of it meant anything. It was as obvious as the repartee in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
Mr. Ephron is a smart man. His blog (ephrononmedia.com) is one of my favorites. And he cuts like Dr. Kildare to the heart of the matter, which is: It’s about sales. It’s not about measuring the amount of oxygen consumed by consumers watching videos of focus groups discussing tweets related to your product. It’s not measuring the space in hectares occupied by all your Web pages printed out and laid end-to-end. It’s about figuring out what people want to buy and selling it to them.
And here’s the kicker to that, previously mentioned but worth repeated nonetheless: You know the lion’s share of that, without measuring as much as a single click-through.
In almost every case you know more about your business, and selling, than you give yourself credit for, in part because you’ve been conditioned to believe that if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t exist.
If you know about your business and think about your business – the two aren’t the same -- you develop hunches, and you can’t quantify a hunch any more than you can quantify what makes my son love applesauce on his spaghetti. But your hunches are valid. Much as the numerologists would prefer otherwise, you know things about your business that defy quantification and measurement.
The problem is that someone at a level of biological development rivaling the slime mold will eventually demand that quantification and measurement, and when you say, “I know because I know the market,” they will tell you it’s not good enough and boot you down the stairs with their prehensile foot.
This has to stop, and if Mr. Ephron is right it will stop. People who know their business, their products and their markets need to once again be given credit for their knowledge. The outsourcing of credibility to a cockeyed phrenologist who claims to be able to establish a movable concept called “ROI” must stop.
After all, what is a reasonable return on investment? What constitutes a return? All sales, or only profitable sales? Sales plus inquiries? Increases in name recognition or brand awareness? A swell in social-media volume? Any and all of them have been measured under the guise of ROI – but are they equally valid?
And here we go again: What constitutes an investment? Spending of dollars? Expending of resources? Thought time? An idea might have percolated in someone’s brain for a decade before exiting relatively full-blown and ready for the market. How do you measure that as an investment?
And to paraphrase Bill Clinton, what do we mean by “on”?
Have an aspirin; it’s good for your heart. And while it’s dissolving, a story.
My pal Carmen told me about a meeting she had with a marcomm manager/client that was looking for help launching a slightly modified version of one of its least popular products. Carmen told her, “The first thing we need to do is come up with internal and external communications plans for the product launch.”
The manager/client blanched –parboiled, maybe – and said, “Well, what’s the sales goal for that? There has to be something we can measure with this, if we’re going to do it.”
Carmen said, “It’s just a plan to create materials for a product launch. There’s nothing to measure. If the product takes off, is it because we did good telling your internal people what we’re going to say and who we’re going to say it to? It’s the things you do that matter, not the things you say you’re going to do.”
“Yeah, but how much more are we going to sell if we do this?” She still didn’t get it.
Let me make it easy for you. The three things you need to keep track of are your budget, your sales goal – overall, if you please -- and your actual sales. What are you spending money on? Does it line up with what and where you’re selling? And does what and where you’re selling line up with what and where you were planning on selling?
A budget tracks dollars, not time, and that’s as it should be. Everyone spends time on something at work – your projects, other people’s projects, eating, the Internet, Facebook, phone pranks, something. But fewer projects usually mean more time spent on each one, doing the same things to achieve the same end.
In other words, time is elastic. Dollars aren’t.
Even though sales goals may be created in a place somewhere south of Gumdrop Valley, they’re a number as firm as the calves of a Dancing With The Stars partner. Actual sales are harder than the payments on a BMW 7-series. And it’s easy to tell where sales are coming from.
So here you go: Three hard numbers that line up if things behave the way you think they should and don’t line up if they don’t behave. Measure away. And think of all the actual work you can do in the time you’re not spending measuring all that other junk.
Once you get off of Facebook, that is.
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