It’s no secret that marketing leaders and their organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their value to their businesses, especially in today’s tough economic environment; the effectiveness of marketing efforts can prove the key differentiator in highly competitive markets.

So, what sets successful marketing organizations apart from their less successful peers?  To learn more, join us for our webinar The Marketing Performance Advantage on February 25 where we will share best practices in measuring and managing Marketing Performance that we uncovered from a study among over 400 CFO, CEO and marketing leaders.

The objective of Marketing Performance Measurement and Management is:

To build the marketing organization’s capabilities to measure, learn from, and improve upon marketing strategies and tactics over time — with the goal of ultimately delivering improved business results.

By studying the responses of organizations that are experiencing a positive impact to their business from their Marketing Performance practices, we were able to identify five key best practices.

To learn more, join us for our webinar The Marketing Performance Advantage on February 25 where we will share best practices that we uncovered from a study among over 400 CFO, CEO and marketing employees of companies with 100+ employees interested in measuring the performance of their marketing initiatives.

There is no question that the science of marketing has grown in importance over the last decade. Just in the last few years, advances in the science of marketing measurement as well as significant changes in communications mediums have transformed the function of marketing and the measurement of its impact on the business. Over the same period, marketing departments are under increasing pressure to defend budgets and more clearly articulate the value they are creating for the organization. The result has been a seismic shift towards the science of marketing and an explosion of interest in marketing measurement.

But has the result been a corresponding improvement in business results?

We found that many of the 400 organizations we surveyed appear to be stuck in the basic tracking and measuring stage of improving marketing effectiveness. And an almost equal number are focused on breaking down barriers to improved performance in areas such as the correlation of measurements and data or incorporating insights into the decision-making process.

We also found that those companies who have fully embraced the concept of Marketing Performance Management have seen a more positive impact by the marketing organization on the business and in turn are more likely to be market leaders. By studying these top-performing companies, we were able to uncover a series of best practices that can be translated across a wide array of organizations to help drive business results.

To learn more, join us for our webinar The Marketing Performance Advantage on February 25 where we will share best practices in measuring and managing Marketing Performance that we uncovered from a study among over 400 CFO, CEO and marketing leaders.

I have something to get off my chest - I love Southwest Airlines.  The significance of this statement is I’m an airline snob - for approximately 10 years I traveled frequently for corporate America on the big airlines, accumulating miles (as well as a threshold for pain) and holding the smaller discount airlines in disdain.  And then last year my eyes were opened to a whole new world in the sky - a world where customers are treated as customers - where the words “we appreciate your business” are backed by service that actually makes me feel appreciated as a customer.

Having developed this affinity towards Southwest I started to contemplate their business model and success.  What struck me is the both the genius as well as the simplicity of their model.  Genius from the standpoint that they were able to innovate by addressing the emotional needs of customers while their competitors where focused on the functional needs (this may be a stretch) and relied on monetary loyalty systems to increase attachment (certainly Southwest’s regional expansion strategy helped them to stay under the radar and gain scale but from my perspective this is not why they are still in business).   Simplicity from the standpoint that there model is based on basic common sense - people like to feel treated well, and if we’re paying for service we expect to be treated well.  And while simple, Southwest’s model is darn near impossible for their competitive peers to replicate because it’s rooted in their culture (one of the most challenging areas for a company to change) and the premise that happy employees = happy customers.  This manifests itself across every touch point I have with Southwest - from the gate agent, to the flight attendees (while I may not always find their attendant performances over the PA system necessarily funny or entertaining I certainly respect the effort - it adds one more personal, human element to the experience) and pilots, to the personalized Southwest stories of exemplary service in their monthly magazine.

While there is no doubt I’ve been converted and am an advocate of Southwest - their success, and the success of others like Zappos, begs the question of which industry and what companies are next to be caught sleeping at the wheel - i.e. do not truly understand their customers and their motivations?