Marketing and the bottom line

The subject is critically important and Ambler's ideas are provocative.

Philip Kotler

Marketing isn't special, it isn't different, it isn't impossible to measure. It's an investment. Unless you can measure its impact, you're wasting your money.

Select the right metrics for your company and ensure a regular assessment of marketing by top management in order to keep performance on track. Here, for the first time, is a book that explains the "why" as well as the "what" and the "how" of marketing metrics.

How much attention does your board give to the sources of cash flow? Perhaps what gets measured is not always what gets done but it's a start. This book explains the reasons for regular marketing assessment by the whole board, key marketplace metrics, and assessing the firm's state of innovation health. Improved marketing requires employees to change what they do, and the way that they do it.

Most companies don't have a clear picture of their marketing performance. Now is the time to see what you are doing. Clarity of goals and assessment of performance separate the professional from the amateur; and only the professionals win.

It is time that marketing stood up and was counted. Literally. This book is the enabler. It's not full of prescriptive rules. Instead it poses questions to ask, suggests possible measurements to make and details experiences from real companies. It does not suffer from consultant speak and is grounded in the reality of the struggle to "make marketing accountable. It is important for the future of marketing.

Market Leader

A blue print for the marketer to impress his or her boss in how to measure the value of their efforts. Numbers haven't been so much fun for a long time. Buy this book.

Brand Republic

Marketers need to be far more accountable, and this book shows them not just how to provide measures of success but also how to achieve top management consensus about marketing investment.

Ken Bishop, Director of Marketing, IBM UK

This is a succinct, witty and mould-breaking book on a very important topic. It should be read by all senior managers and marketers.

Professor Hugh Davidson, Cranfield School of Management

This book is a big step forward in assessing marketing impact - an area which is short of regular performance management.

Sir John Egan, CBI

Contents

• Is your metrics system good enough?
• Brand equity is an elephant
• Financial fallacies
• Metrics evolution: How did we get where we are?
• A practical methodology for selecting the right external metrics
• Using metrics to improve innovation performance
• Employee-based brand equity
• Brand transparency
• Assessing the performance of the mix
• Getting the right metrics to the top table
• The fuzzy future
• Appendices
• Index