Modern Measurement: The Subtle Art of Generating Results and ROI

It would be an understatement to say how we advertise and how brands are built have changed a lot in the last few years. However, the main tenets of presenting a brand proposition that leads consumers to select yours repeatedly remain the same.

Over the last hundred years, sales were rewarded to manufacturers and retailers by consumers for having a quality product, sold at a fair price, at a convenient place, and perhaps at times was on sale (you know, the 4Ps from your high school marketing class — product, price, place, promotion). Today, all that has changed, especially given our current economic circumstances. Convincing consumers of your brand's benefit has become a much more difficult task with compounded shrink in household budgets.

Regardless of what’s happening economically right now, the challenge facing marketers has been building for some time: how to build brand love while generating growth. If you’re a chief marketing officer, your job description has changed seemingly overnight because now you're accountable for sales growth, commercial optimization, unified performance across various retail and media channels, and entirely unique commerce ecosystems, such as e-commerce, retail media networks, direct-to-consumer (D-to-C), and more.

In other words, “building brand awareness” is no longer your primary remit.

Now CMOs and their team have broader oversight into activation, investments and performance. And it will require a nearly flawless waltz from one to the other, extracting insights along the way and informing next best actions to create exceeding year-over-year growth.

So, how exactly do you achieve this? A united approach to commerce performance data can bring the optimal balance of data acquisition and application that’s informed by a purposeful data organization strategy. This reality runs smack into the ambitious growth mandates CMOs and marketing executives are looking to fulfill. That kind of growth requires a marketing agenda that's far more sophisticated, predictive and customized than ever before. It requires a different playbook with new approaches and tools that few have yet to fully master.

However, success is around the corner for those who bring attention to detail. One of the most pressing business challenges facing consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers is not the identification of business opportunities that can deliver results, but rather the prioritization of the many opportunities across the commerce ecosystem that have the highest success rate for yielding a return.

So how should you prioritize? Many suppliers leave out critical drivers like the interaction between online and offline, supply chain complexity, product readiness, shopper preferences, and platform functionality. Or they may be paralyzed by the endless array of measures that can be included in the process, leading to an overengineered statistical nightmare that’s perceived as impressive, yet is highly ineffective.

We suggest you start by setting a new standard for performance outcomes by considering the following best practices:

• Publish performance on everyone’s desktop. You’ll grow your data and creative department and better solve business problems overnight.
• Reassess key time periods to send marketing messages.
• Realize the impact of creative and its result on return on investment.
• Uncover insights into cross-channel marketing impact (how one channel impacts the media mix or vice versa).
• Seek real-time optimization of people-based behavior data/signals.
• Build or buy predictive tools to help with business planning.
• Investigate attribution, measuring individual marketing media effectiveness.
• Clearly outline a path for holistic measurement and unified return.

With the proliferation of software tools available to help work more efficiently, and effectively, create smarter content, solidify customer relationships, and measure our efforts, the opportunities are now within reach. Building the data foundation for your marketing tech stack requires a clear and robust data strategy that defines the role of each level of data (zero, first, second and third party). Crafting and galvanizing a purposeful data organization strategy will be the difference-maker in aggregating a plethora of random results vs. unlocking connected dots to insights leading to understanding and correlation between your investments and actions to generate a true ROI.

You can have both tangible campaign results and productive investment returns. The trick is understanding the correlation between your investments and actions that will help your brand generate ROI that’s true of the 4Ps of marketing you learned in high school business class.

Sherif Fahmy is senior vice president, performance strategy, at Advantage Unified Commerce, a  company that helps build brand value for manufacturers and retailers through insight-based sales, marketing, and technology solutions. Fran Brinkman is senior vice president, performance analytics, at Advantage Unified Commerce.