By Barbara Bacci Mirque:
At the recent ANA Marketing Accountability Conference, we heard from a series of marketing accountability practitioners including Doug Palladini from Vans, Dean Adams from 3M, Rich Martino from US Bank, Pat LaPointe filling in for Blair Gibson from Merck, Karna Crawford from Coke, and Jay Gillespie from Fiskars. Ed Abrams from IBM was the master of ceremonies. The recurrent theme from the speakers: CFO buy in is a great asset in the success of marketing accountability programs. This is verified by the recent 2008 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability survey in which we saw positive movement in the marketing/finance relationship over the past year.
Build a culture of inclusion with finance and you will be on your way to a successful marketing accountability effort. Jay Gillespie told us how by including finance in consumer focus groups there is now such buy in that often the CFO will intervene when cost cutting discussions ensue and claim that it is important to build the brand! Dean Adams mentioned that at 3M the controller is on the same floor as marketing and Karna Crawford noted that at the Coca Cola Company, finance is integrated into the marketing teams. Ed Abrams said that at IBM it is not just finance that has a seat at the marketing table but also sales and general management functions. When you don’t do this the results are that finance will not buy into your numbers, they won’t trust marketing and they won’t take the marketing numbers to the street.
If we don’t want marketing to be considered the black box that asks for cash we must implement these simple strategies. ANA members can obtain more information about this important topic by joning the ANA Marketing Accountability Committee and visiting the ANA Marketing Insights Center and searching "marketing accountability".
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