Marketing in the Participation Age: A Guide to Motivating People to Join, Share, Take Part, Connect, and Engage

Chapter 10

D + E + C = P2

Performance

Digital technology makes it easier for marketers to determine what does and doesn’t work. Some marketers have taken the next step and tied this to evaluate overall marketing return on investment (ROI). Analytics techniques are now available to provide marketers and their agency partners with the marketing effectiveness data in real time. This is both good and bad news for today’s marketers.

I thought my job was relatively challenging when I was working in marketing at Hewlett-Packard (HP). However, it now looks pretty simple compared with what’s required by today’s standards. For most of my years at HP, the majority of our marketing activities and budgets were centered on product launches. We would plan for months to develop all the marketing communications activities leading up to the big launch. In some ways, those days were much easier for marketers because we would all breathe a sigh of relief the day after the launch and then relax for a month or two before ramping up for the next one. We spent more than 80 percent of our budgets in the first three months following the launch date, and generally we didn’t even bother to review the campaign’s effectiveness until six months later. We usually measured effectiveness in the form of awareness and preference for the product and service, media spend effectiveness, and share of voice compared with that of competitors during that time period. Let’s face it: we basically convinced company leadership ...