Doing More With Less

Viewpoint by Sarah Essex, Senior Partner

Never before has this been truer in the world of marketing. CEOs, CFOs and their Non-Executive Boards want every investment penny to go toward growth - and so they should.  As global competition intensifies, they are less tolerant of spending that is hard to quantify.  At the top of their checklists are marketing investment decisions, which critics still charge are made more on feelings rather than on facts.  Marketers today have to be able to not only determine the ROI of marketing investments, but also determine what business and organizational changes are likely to improve ROI and by how much.

Fortunately, there are six basic principles that successful companies have adopted which allow them to do more with less. These 6 principles can serve as a guidepost for others:

1. Develop clear, consistent metrics and scorecards that cut across business units to track performance of marketing campaigns and investments
2. Improve analytical productivity by relentlessly analyzing the drivers of key business growth metrics (volume growth, price growth, or conversion across a key bottleneck in the purchase process, such as from awareness to active consideration)
3. Determine how to improve ROI quickly by conducting in-market tests based on experimental design techniques
4. Avoid myopia and calculate both short-term revenue as well as long-term brand equity returns on investment
5. Optimize the performance of your current investment by reallocating across silos
6. Transform the organization into a learning organization that is not afraid of testing, designing pilots and actively learning from both successful and less successful outcomes

Firms that steadily follow these principles will pull ahead of the pack, improve ROI and ultimately do more with more.