Is ROI the Best Measure?

When times are good and consumers are buying, marketers aren’t necessarily pressured to measure success and evaluate ROI. After all, when products are flying off the shelves and sales and profits are up, you know the numbers will look good.

But what happens when the economy is struggling and there’s more pressure to measure the results of marketing programs?

In today’s economy, budgets are being stripped, companies are downsizing, consumers are struggling to make ends meet, and brand marketers are more focused than ever on ROI. But is ROI really the best measure?

Yes, we must make the numbers to stay in the game, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

What is the point of our marketing programs? On one hand, it’s about sales, so ROI makes sense. On the other hand, marketing programs today must be about more than price. We must deliver value, which is not always about price.

Every marketing program should build toward a long-term vision for the brand. Why is the shopper buying our product? Sure, it fills a need, but there are probably any number of similar products that can fill the same need. More likely, the shopper chooses a product because he or she connects with the brand. It’s relevant to their lives or it provides a solution or value for them.

When times are tough, it’s tempting to shout, “Save a dollar!” to every shopper who will listen. In a tough economy, businesses often turn to promotions to meet volume numbers. However, dropping coupons to drive volume can erode your brand equity over time. But if you use promotions effectively and provide value to your core shoppers by creating marketing programs that are solution-focused or idea-based, or that leverage partnerships and properties that are relevant to shoppers’ lives, you will drive volume and build brand equity and loyalty.

At their core, marketing programs — in any economy — should be working to build brand loyalty, program by program, purchase by purchase.

There are companies in different categories that are toughing out the tough times with different strategies, but the commonality they all share is the way they stick to a long-term vision for the brand, regardless of the marketing program.

Take McDonald’s. The fast-food company has a long-running dollar menu. “Aha,” you say. “What could be more price-focused than a dollar menu?” The beauty of the dollar menu is that it also plays to the core vision of the brand — delivering something of value for the dollar. If the dollar menu delivered some cheapened version of the product, it would be a failure in terms of both ROI and the brand. Instead, it rewards consumers with a brand experience that shows that the company values their loyalty.

And there are others who are thriving quite nicely during these tough times. How would you like to have consumers literally beating a path to your door to buy your product? Apple is one of the lucky ones — wasn’t that the case when Apple launched the latest iPhone? There again, it clearly had a lower price, but it was also about delivering on the long-term vision of the brand experience. Apple made it affordable to experience its iPhone.

And we could continue to build a list of brands that have found a balance between ROI and long-term vision. Look at Target, or Walmart. In both cases, these brands know their DNA and deliver the brand experience every day and in every way.

Ultimately, of course, this leads us to the question that every marketer must face: Can you measure loyalty, or the emotional connection to a brand? You could argue that ROI measures show this number. What better measure of loyalty can there be than product sales? But sales are just that — the number of products sold, but without any knowledge of who bought them or how those buyers feel about your brand.

So as marketers, we need to look at other measures, such as attitude and usage research. That’s where we can start to get granular and discover who’s buying our product and why. We can start to parse the numbers and see where we have loyal users, trial and sales. The total picture then becomes a valuable tool to inform our marketing programs moving forward, so that we can continue to drive volume and build brand equity and loyalty.

Vision, patience and value plus mentality are important in today’s economy.

Maria Zanghetti is a vice president with TracyLocke, an integrated marketing agency. She can be reached at [email protected].