Cranfield School of Management

The Value of Marketing Metrics

Specialisation has been the main trend in the twentieth century, starting from the production and extending to all the other business functions. This process was to improve the efficiency in each area of the business, and also to develop expertise in each sector. At the end of the century the financial function increased its importance generating a high concern about measures (Financial) and meeting financial targets among all the others (Lehmann, 2004). In this context, Marketing has produced a very solid set of non-financial measures but has done very little to establish a financial assessment of its performance especially in the long-term. Furthermore, recent research contradict some of the assumptions that marketers have held for long time regarding the financial impact of marketing as for example concerning the positive relationship between loyalty and profitability (Sheth and Sharma, 2001). For these reasons, marketing is progressively loosing resources and credibility among companies (Woodburn, 2006). Therefore measuring the impact of marketing has been at the centre of many current researches Six main frameworks (methodology) have been identified in the literature with the aim of establishing the impact of marketing on corporate strategies and shareholders value (Mouncey, 2004).
1. Value-based planning
2. Market based assets
3. Marketing productivity
4. Benchmarking marketing processes
5. Brand equity
6. Customer equity