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What is Marketing Accountability to you?

Modo Modo Agency

September 10, 2008

Companies everyday are challenged with supporting or reinventing their reason for being. Examining their vision statement. Assessing whether they are building the right team to accomplish their mission.

A huge part of our focus at Modo Modo Agency is on driving accountability in marketing programs. Which is fine, if everyone defines accountability the same way. They don’t.

How do you define accountability?

For some accountability is about having real-time data that shows marketing activities are delivering positive margin growth. For others, accountability may mean that the VP of Marketing is so closely connected with the customer that all activity springs from customer demand. For others, success in marketing accountability may mean that the CMO is trusted and sits at the Chairman’s table.

Looking for some ideas for how to prove your marketing success?

If you’re attempting to prove your worth (and you’re NOT a statistician or data manager), start with some basic statistics like these:
• Sales volume increase
• Sales margin increase
• Segment volume or margin increase
• For mature markets with known numbers…market share
• Advertising awareness
• Traffic patterns or volume increases correlating to order

Get benchmarks and set a time in the future to measure against your benchmark. The amount of time you wait will be based on the length of your sales cycle. And if you’re a product marketing manager and you’ve got one of those statisticians handy, ask them if they can help you with your “conjoint utilities and consumer preferences”.

Prove it!

We welcome your emails or posts regarding what you regard as most critical where accountability is concerned. Let us know what “proof” you are asked to submit to justify your existence or your budget.