By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
Over the past two months, we reviewed better measures for determining marketing productivity with the goal of quantifying its effectiveness to management’s satisfaction intent upon quantifiable results. Here are two last steps we can take to develop better measures of marketing productivity.
The first method for measuring and enhancing marketing productivity is to see existing and potential marketing offerings as value propositions for your target market. Especially primarily for business-to-business markets, this method suggests using a mix of different value assessments to determine the potential of key market offerings.
A Persuasive Value Proposition
In practice, the marketer translates as many product features in terms of both traditional ‘customer benefits,’ and into monetary worth or ‘value’ to customers. The overall value is then compared to the value of competitive alternatives to define a persuasive ‘value proposition.’
The underlying idea is that your company has the best chance to gain a fair return on the necessary investment.
Our final procedure is Path Marketing Analysis (PMA), developed by John A, Weber and Utpal Dholakia. PMA can provide measures for estimating the prospective return of alternative potential marketing strategies. It also clarifies useful financial perspectives for adjusting the marketing budget to contribute the best possible value.
‘PMA Market Profiles’
One starts by defining product market boundaries for each market offerings and then developing ‘PMA Market Profiles’ for each key market. This PMA Market Profile lists weaknesses and related opportunities of a company’s marketing offering for each market segment.
First, the team estimates current annual industry sales and the company’s sales for that narrowly-defined segment. Next, they try to explain the overall competitive gap. These explanations become PMA Market Profile Gaps, and the size of each gap as a percentage of IS defines its tactical market response function.
When combined, the overall gap structure defines a strategic market response model. To apply the framework for a specific target segment requires three PMA Market Profiles for the current year; a future year with no new strategies; and a third for that same future year with an alternative potential marketing strategy.
This allows a firm to simulate alternative potential marketing strategies and provides a foundation for generating comparative projected rates of return on new assets employed for each potential strategy and strategic scenario considered.
I invite you to contact me to share your own successes with marketing program measurement. You can reach me at 610–585 0801, or email me at [email protected].
Read previous columns in Fleet Marketing archives
