The latest issue of our e-newsletter, Perspectives, is available online now.

As the global recession slowly recedes, many businesses are moving their focus from survival back to growth. Investment in finding and capturing growth opportunities is returning. However, during the downturn, the agenda for marketers changed. To meet new demands, marketing’s role must evolve to accept greater accountability for its performance.

CMGP has always believed that marketing can and should be a strategic asset. As such, the increased focus on marketing’s accountability is a natural evolution. Continue reading to learn more about this evolution and its implications, as well as how marketing performance management will be a key differentiator in today’s highly competitive marketplace.

In this issue:

• The CMO’s Agenda
• Achieving the Marketing Performance Advantage
• Loyalty, the Holy Grail of Marketing

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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.

Take a look at a recent press release with findings from our recently released study; The Marketing Performance Advantage.

We partnered with Chadwick Martin Bailey on a survey of 400 companies to explore links between performance and specific marketing management best practices.

Top-line findings included:

• B2B companies and mid-sized firms were both three times as likely as other companies to have no measurement system in place
• 44% of B2B firms report limited or no marketing measurement, twice as many as their B2C counterparts
• Around half of all mid-sized companies reported that they were finding the improving the performance of marketing initiatives a “huge challenge” - twice as many as their larger brethren
• One of the biggest challenges? “lack of data” according to 40%

CMG Partners hits the road again for an upcoming event hosted by the Fairfield County Chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA).  This event continues the discussion outlined in the results of a recent research study we jointly conducted with Chadwick Martin Bailey, titled The Marketing Performance Advantage.

We’ll be exploring how organizations approach marketing performance management, including:

• Five best practices of top performing marketing organizations
• Practical examples of tackling tough measurement and performance issues
• How to overcome common barriers to enhanced marketing effectiveness

Please join us on Wednesday October 14th at the Courtyard Marriott in Norwalk, CT from 6:00-9:00PM.

Email to RSVP

For more information, please click here

How well are companies doing at improving their marketing efforts? What sets successful marketing organizations apart from their less successful peers?

These and other questions led us to partner with a like-minded organization, the Boston-based, market-research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey, to field a landmark study of more than 400 companies. Our goal was to determine some of the key attributes of successful marketing organizations and to understand what marketing practices they employ. The findings, including identification of best practices from top performers, were released today in our white paper The Marketing Performance Advantage.  Stay tuned for more details posted here in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, check out the press release or visit the Marketing Performance Advantage microsite to download the full report.

In this special issue of Perspectives, our e-newsletter, get an advanced look at the forthcoming findings gained through two in-depth research studies CMG Partners conducted among more than 450 companies.

CMO 2.0 — Part II of our series on The CMO’s Agenda
This new round of in-depth conversations with 30 additional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) reveals the need to redefine the role of the lead marketer. But in order for CMOs to reach this more elevated and transformational role they must be willing to forsake many previously accepted practices and assume greater accountability.

The Marketing Performance Advantage
This landmark survey of more than 400 companies uncovers some of the key attributes of successful marketing organizations and the practices they employ. Those companies that excel at marketing performance management are reaping the rewards by taking a more holistic approach to improvement; both measuring AND managing their marketing performance.

Our firm decided to organize a team building exercise for our next full-team meeting.  We’ve been divided up into groups each tasked with developing a three course meal around a select ingredient, which it turns out is lemons.

The task at hand got me thinking about marketing; in particular how it’s frequently viewed as both an art and a science.  Cooking and baking are very much the same way.  Baking is about precision.  You have to measure ingredients with care and follow the recipe closely or else you may wind up eating goo or concrete instead of a moist cake.  Cooking on the other hand allows for more creativity.  You have much greater flexility to add or subtract ingredients and alter the amounts of each, but again it takes an experienced hand to know how to blend the right elements together.

As marketers we know this is very analogous to marketing.  It’s about knowing how to balance the art and science of marketing.  There are moments when a disciplined approach is more appropriate.  The current environment is one that has put the science of marketing at the forefront of Chief Marketing Officers’ agendas.  It’s become critical to prove that marketing can deliver value that drives business growth.  But you can’t overdo it and boil marketing down to a science.  Your marketing will become bland, stale, and downright unappealing.

We can’t forget that great marketing engages customers on an emotional level, and unforgettable campaigns draw upon creative ideas that are nothing short of genius.  As customers become more accustomed to the same marketing dishes, it’s our job as marketers to refresh our recipes in order to create demand.  This is even more important now as customers have greater access to the set of ingredients (the 4Ps) that marketers once had exclusively at their disposal.

As you begin to hone your marketing strategy and develop future campaigns think about if you’ve got the right balance of art and science.  I particularly like how Seth Godin thought about this issue in a blog posting from earlier this year.  You don’t want to end up with someone returning the plate but rather asking for seconds.  Bon Appetit.

We’ve been asked why we choose to talk about marketing performance instead of marketing effectiveness, the latter being the term that most people still choose to use.

Marketing effectiveness has become an outdated term since it’s often narrowly defined as the act of measuring the effectiveness of marketing investments relative to actual results.  While we don’t question the importance of identifying the right measures, developing processes to collect data, and using those learnings to inform future marketing investments, this is only part of what needs to be addressed to improve marketing performance.  Insights such as ROI enable measurement and drive change that may lead to better decisions but they are primarily focused on end results.

It’s critical to address process and people, the key variables that permit organizational alignment and make change possible.  Companies will frequently assume that if employees have better information they will know how to apply it but that’s not always the case.  Taking a more holistic view and recognizing that you can’t just focus on pulling one lever without adjusting the others is an important obstacle to overcome.  We’ve encountered situations where marketing organizations have undergone organizational changes; significant time and energy went into deciding where to place people but not enough resources were dedicated to update processes accordingly.  The result has been poor coordination and communication, leading to confusion and ultimately subpar marketing performance.

We believe this is what makes our framework unique.  It takes a more holistic view of the marketing process, and allows organizations to not only understand how changing inputs and variables impact marketing performance, but also ensure that those learnings translate into actions and ultimately improved marketing results.  Ultimately, the key is being able to translate information into learnings and actions.