Mi Opinion

Achieving Accountable Marketing:

Six Critical Value Levers Must Be Pulled
By Michael Dunn
Senior management continues to dial up the pressure on marketers to demonstrate a strong return on investment. They’re demanding higher levels of accountability and seeking assurance that every penny spent is helping to drive both top- and bottom-line business growth. Marketers must respond bydemonstrating disciplined planning, rigorous tracking and evaluation, and, above all, continuous improvement in performance. They also must be able to link spending cause and effect, quickly diagnose the root causes of any spending performance issues, and make timely, fact-driven decisions to improve returns. In short, the pressure’s on to achieve marketing performance that is both efficient and effective.Call it accountable marketing performance, a goal that can best be met when six dimensions — or “value levers” — are applied properly. The following describes each and the roles they play in driving optimal marketing performance. Value Lever #1 — Strategy The “strategy” lever is critical since it sets up a series of choices that inform most of the subsequent activities across the other levers. Itencompasses a series of decisions about strategic marketing choices: • With which set or sets of customers your company has the best business opportunities. • The behavioral responses from these target groups that are most achievable. • What unique set of benefits, attributes, and ideas has the highest probability of eliciting the desired behavioral response. • Identification of specificbrand or business challenges that may stymie your efforts. Erroneous assumptions around any one of these issues can fatally undermine the effectiveness of all of your downstream marketing investments. Most organizations can avoid this by having a disciplined and transparent approach for addressing these questions so that all relevant participants fully understand the facts, data, beliefs, andassumptions that each of these decisions is based on. “How do we know?” becomes the most common refrain in this kind of process as everyone can stress test the thinking, question the fact base, and look for the hidden underbelly of any decision, in a way that ultimately improves the final answer. The process involves putting into place a set of well-understood analytic techniques involving customersegmentation and targeting, customer driver analysis, pathway modeling, brand equity modeling, and purchase funnel analysis. All these tools can be utilized to help your company begin to focus on the right answers. When these analytic approaches are used as a foundational input into the decision, without shutting out equally valid qualitatively driven insights and intuitive thinking, a companytypically ends up with a strategic value proposition that is worth its weight in gold. Value Lever #2 — Content This value lever anchors on the translation of the strategic foundation into compelling, engaging, and mediumappropriate messaging ideas. “Messaging” here refers to the whole creative package of taglines, copy, visuals, color, sound, and iconography that comprise the broader communication orcontent platform. The best content platforms originate from a magical combination of strategic

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Strategy Content Marketing Vehicles Investment Levels In-Market Execution Fixed Cost Management

The six levers that drive accountable marketing investment.

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insight andcreative expression, and connect in authentic yet emotionally compelling ways. Two companies that have delivered outstanding performances relative to this value lever are Staples and Mastercard. Staples laddered its “hassle-free shopping experience” strategic insight into the “That was Easy” campaign, with its big, red, playful “Easy” button. Mastercard translated its “enabling my purchases for...