Assessment of brand marketing capability

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Question - are your people performing as well as they should be?

Answer - measure them and find out.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.. Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Performance is relative to:

• history
• targets/strategy – you may be harvesting or even exiting a business
• what would otherwise have been achieved given the confounding factors

We recommend using three measurements together:

1. Measurement of statistical performance, using statistical process control tools
2. Measurement vs. objectives, which may require statistical analysis as well as a straight assessment of whether the target has been achieved or not, depending on whether the objectives are hard or soft
3. Assessing performance in relation to best practice. This is softer, and behavioural. We have identified 10 best practices, and the tool invites you to site behavioural examples of compliance with best practice, and to summarise the performance in a score. There should then be recommendations as to how the brand marketer could meet best practice (“score a 10”). You may, of course, substitute your own best practices for ours, but the same principles apply

In theory, assessing brand marketing performance is simple.

You have inputs and you have outputs. You invest in activities and you get results.

If you do the right things, sales and profits grow. If you do wrong things, they decline.

The problem, as anyone who has had to measure performance will tell you, is that there are many confounding factors:

• seasonality
• the economy
• strategic intent
• fashions
• out-of-stocks
• the weather
• competitive activity
• random fluctuations and statistical margin of error
• false readings

In the study of human behaviour, there are no “counterfactuals”. You cannot turn the clock back, and run the experiment again as you would under laboratory conditions.

Performance is therefore relative to:

1. history
2. targets/strategy – you may be harvesting or even exiting a business
3. what would otherwise have been achieved given the confounding factors

We believe that you have three things to measure in assessing brand marketing performance:

1. statistical performance
2. achievement of objectives/forecasts
3. best practice

Current performance vs. historical performance is certainly one measure of capability, especially if you are seeking growth.

In addition, you can set forecasts and measure whether they are achieved. Forecasts are a question of negotiation. The person being measured wants the lowest forecast. Higher manager generally wants the highest. So achievement of forecasts is as much a measure of negotiation skills as it is of performance.

The third measure requires a leap of faith. You have to believe that if someone does the rights things, and has a profound insight into the market, they are likely to out-perform those who do not.

So we recommend using all three measurements together:

• Measurement of statistical performance, using statistical process control tools
• Measurement vs. objectives, which may require statistical analysis as well as a straight assessment of whether the target has been achieved or not, depending on whether the objectives are hard or soft
• Assessing performance in relation to best practice. This is softer, and behavioural. We have identified 10 best practices, and the tool invites you to site behavioural examples of compliance with best practice, and to summarise the performance in a score. There should then be recommendations as to how the brand marketer could meet best practice (“score a 10”). You may, of course, substitute your own best practices for ours, but the same principles apply

In the end, we would bet that brand marketing rigour will produce superior results. The question is, will you?

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