Marketing Management, 16th Edition

Measuring Communication Effectiveness

Senior managers want to know the outcomes and revenues resulting from their communication investments. Too often, however, their communication managers supply only inputs, like press clippings or the number of ads, and expenses, like media costs. In fairness, communication managers try to translate inputs into intermediate outputs, such as reach and frequency (the percentage of the target market exposed to a communication and the number of exposures), recall and recognition scores, persuasion changes, and cost-per-thousand calculations.

After implementing the communication plan, marketers must measure its effectiveness. Research on the impact of communication seeks to determine the degree to which a company’s ...