Driving Marketing Effectiveness Forward

By: Michael Palmer

ANA offers its members a unique opportunity – to benchmark six of its marketing processes (btw this service is free to ANA members) including:

1. Overall Process Linkage
2. Insights and Marketing Knowledge
3. Marketing Strategy
4. Annual Marketing Planning
5. Integrated Marketing
6. Marketing Measurements (Metrics)

What we have discovered is most interesting.  The two areas that have bubbled to the surface as those where marketers are having the most difficulty (regardless of whether they are B2Bor B2C) - Insights and Marketing Knowledge and Integrated Marketing.  Marketing organizations are horrible about collecting data and turning that data into insightful action – then sharing those incredibly valuable insights internally to drive revenue growth.  Integrated marketing is something we marketers talk about incessantly, but do little about.  This is the area where we have the paltriest of results.

What’s the problem?  First, a consistent weakness is an inadequate marketing library from which success models and critical marketing documents may be easily shared globally. Most companies seem to have a poorly maintained repository of aging and increasingly irrelevant documents which are largely ignored by the employee base.  So the information is collected but no one is using it effectively.  Not very smart when we know that marketing insights drive everything we marketers should be doing.

Secondly, most companies lack anything meeting the definition of a process in the areas of insight development, brand equity building and integrated marketing campaign assembly. Marketers seem to employ an ad hoc approach whose output depends upon the individual brilliance (or luck) of a team leader rather than an embedded, reproducible corporate competence.

And we marketers expect the rest of the company to respect us as business leaders? 

If you are an ANA member company why wouldn’t you want to measure your effectiveness in the six key processes listed above, the fact that you can learn where and how you could increase your marketing effectiveness and thereby increase your marketing leadership would seem most valuable – if this is the case, just send me an email ([email protected]) and I’ll hook you up. For those not ANA members who wish to find out where/how you can improve – email me as well and we’ll talk membership.