Where marketing effectiveness really lies
The AMI’s recent annual conference was clearly a resounding success. As well as a very strong local line-up of presenters, such as Ian Alwill of Nestlé, Nick Rodd of McDonald’s and John Roberts of the University of New South Wales and the London Business School, we also had four outstanding international presenters.
Professor Raj Srivastava, from Emory University in the United States, is one of the leading thinkers in marketing and financial performance and spoke about the ‘hidden value’ of intangible assets such as brands. Pat LaPointe, of MarketingNPV in New Jersey, gave a lucid and fascinating presentation on marketing metrics dashboards.
David Haigh, from Brand Finance in the United Kingdom, addressed the topic of brand value and brand equity with his usual clarity and insight. Paul Alexander, formerly with dunnhumby and now CEO of his own firm, Wigborough, in the UK, talked about the latest extraordinary developments in data analytics using both formal and social network data.
Most people attending were fulsome in their praise, with many rating it the best-ever AMI conference. Yet there were a few feedback forms from the main sessions where people complained that some of the material presented was “too technical”.
This is truly disappointing. If you work in marketing and you don’t want to know about issues that require a basic knowledge of finance or business strategy, then you are selling yourself short. The fact that the daily papers cover virtually nothing else but communications is not a reflection of the totality of marketing and is not a guide to what marketers should consider their realm.
There are two reasons I think this is important.
The first is that marketing effectiveness depends on more than creative ads and good media selection – important though they both are. Effectiveness depends on leveraging marketing assets properly and to do that you need to understand concepts such as net present value of future cash flows. Effectiveness also requires alignment with financial and business strategy goals. In this regard, the sorts of topics our conference presenters were addressing are basically ‘required reading’.
The second reason, as I’m sure you appreciate, is that marketing still has some way to go to gain proper recognition of its role and this is the path to appropriate acknowledgement.
I know this is a topic I write about quite often, but it’s one of the fundamental reasons for the existence of our Institute. I would be pleased to have your views. |
