Jim Garrity, Chief Marketing Officer, Wachovia, and his colleague, Bob DeAngelis, Senior Vice President, Managing Director, Customer Analytics, Research and Targeting, Wachovia, share their thoughts with me on marketing accountability and provide advice for marketers who are facing similar challenges below.
1. Jim, your presentation at this year’s ANA Annual Conference: Masters of Marketing is titled “Organization Leadership Drives Marketing Accountability.” What points can you share from your experience that contributes to making marketing more accountable?
It starts with the CMO and marketing leaders taking ownership of accountability. For years marketers got away with the belief that marketing is more about art than science. That has changed dramatically in the past few years and we're all moving up the "science learning curve."
In our case, a merger in 2001 between First Union and Wachovia and the resulting decision to take the much lesser known name (Wachovia) created some interesting dynamics in the world of marketing. Most significant was a sizeable increase in the marketing budget, allowing us to build this virtually unknown name, pretty much from scratch. This placed a heightened sense of accountability on our shoulders and represents the catalyst for our modeling and ROI work that are serving us very well today.
2. What advice do both of you have for marketers at other companies who are facing similar challenges that you face – both in creating metrics and leading organization change to become more accountable.
Get professional help - internally as well as externally. Our story begins with a great internal partnership across three sister organizations: Marketing, Customer Analytics and Finance. For the past four years, this partnership has increasingly delivered more quantifiable evidence of the value of marketing investments.
We have also partnered with an external analytics company which has developed a proprietary ROI model that we effectively use today, while continuing to learn from the model and evolving it to be highly predictable. We are currently making real time changes to our marketing plans as the model has directionally indicated.
As it relates to leading organizational change, we have relied on a strong consultative approach in leveraging the ROI model learnings to influence our marketing decisions. In our company's culture, it is critical to approach marketing decisions from a basis of collaborative partnership rather than that of a central "order giver." Toward that end, the ROI models are positioned to provide directional insight for creating hypotheses that are tested in partnership with our internal line of business partners rather than the "single source of truth." This approach has helped to alleviate resistance around recommendations that are counterintuitive or represent change from past practices and beliefs.
3. Can you provide us with insight on how you have managed the process?
The partnerships noted above have been key. We are also very transparent with all of our data, from the CEO on down through all of the business units. We have found, across the board, an incredible hunger for this type of information. This work has been helping us move toward a culture of fact-based decision making. This can be difficult at times since the results we see coming from our model are often quite counter-intuitive.
