Mungo Dunnett Associates: Management and Marketing Consultancy

Marketing Evaluation

Background

Marketing is both victim and its own worst enemy. It is frequently seen as a soft target during budget rounds, where there is often scant evidence that its activities have created an acceptable return on investment.

The result is that marketing is frequently unable to defend itself – but with the result that budget is removed both for the questionable activities and those that were generating important business. It is therefore in nobody’s interests that marketing is subjected to subjective decision-making: this is an important revenue-generating area that can – and must – be subjected to the same type of business scrutiny as an operational area.

The evaluation of marketing, which is rarely done with anything approaching ‘normal’ business rigour, is in practice remarkably straightforward. Though marketing is devilishly difficult to execute well, effective evaluation involves nothing like these complexities. The relatively simple procedures shown in the next sections, and which we adopt equally in our work in all industry sectors, quickly indicate where expenditure is being profitable – and where it does indeed deserve to be cut.