Marketing Accountability and ROI, Part I

To illustrate the power of reallocating funds to more effective and efficient forms of media, marketers need look no further than a recent beauty aid campaign.  While attending a recent media conference, I learned about how Dove, a leading brand for Unilever, recently created a 75-second film that could have aired on television first, but instead was made available on the video-sharing website YouTube.  As a result of allocating resources to this “social marketing” activity, Dove generated three times more web traffic to their website (CampaignForRealBeauty.com) than a comparable Super Bowl advertisement, at a fraction of the cost.  Now that is marketing ROI!

In order to execute to this holistic approach to measuring and improving marketing ROI, organizations must blend their various data sources then apply them across multiple analysis techniques.  Once marketing insights have been captured, the organization will need to share lessons learned and put new plans into action. Sharing what works and what doesn’t ultimately enables more accurate predictions of sales performance.

For instance, for capturing ROI on mass marketing, large advertisers and agencies deploy marketing mix analysis, long utilized for optimizing the media mix for leading consumer-based industries like consumer packaged goods (CPG) and automotive.  Large manufacturers can make smarter decisions about what areas of their advertising (like television, radio, and print) and campaigns (like sending samples) are most effective and efficient.  

In the previous Dove example, Unilever was able to simultaneously enhance brand awareness and identify specific consumers that wanted samples of Dove products.

Thanks to a growing supply of relevant data sources, established marketing analytic models, and web-based marketing applications, leading marketers are now able to execute positive changes to their marketing plan and share these improvements with fellow executives, agencies, and other marketing partners.

By fusing these capabilities within their business, innovative marketing organizations may fully enable better decision-making to generate greater return-on-marketing investments (ROMI).  Greater effectiveness and efficiency ultimately will enable the CMO and the CFO to enhance shareholder value together.


Mark A. Chaves is a Customer Intelligence product manager at SAS Institute, Cary, NC. He can be reached at mark.chaves@sas.com Copyright © 2006 SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA.  All Rights Reserved.

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