Every executive who is responsible for the way their company competes should study the metrics in this book, July 25, 2006

By Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) –
  

This review is from: Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master (Hardcover)

Personally, I love these kinds of handbooks. Having a ready resource for these dozens of metrics can help any executive understand their business and think about ways to compete in the marketplace in new ways. Too often marketing is thought of in terms of advertising and sales, but it is so much more than that. Marketing is everything your company does or needs to do to choosing a marketplace, the products to compete with, how to promote and sell them, and how to better understand your market, your competition, and how it is changing over time. This excellent book has eleven chapters. The first provides an introduction to the book, its layout and purpose. The last chapter takes you through what the authors call the marketing x-ray. It explains the practical aspects of the ratios provided and how they can reveal things about apparently healthy companies that can help you make changes before it is too late, just as an x-ray can alert you to a health problem before things become dire. The other nine chapters take the reader through various business ratios for measuring your share of the hears, minds, and markets of your customers, margins and profits, product and portfolio management, customer profitability, sales force and channel management, pricing strategy, promotion, advertising media and web metrics, and marketing and finance. What is good about working through these metrics is that you will be asking yourself questions that you need to ask. Even if the metric doesn’t apply to your specific situation, finding out that it doesn’t will help you think more clearly about your situation. You may find that some of them will help you think through things that are important to your business with a new perspective. Some of the data for the metrics is hard to come by, and thinking that through will help you think about your business in a more focused way because your assumptions will have to be more explicitly made rather than the kind of vague impressions we too often let suffice for thinking about our business. This book is an excellent resource and all executives responsible for the way their business competes in the marketplace should have this book. I believe there are also seminars being offered that teach the metrics on this book. While I have no idea of their quality, they do sound interesting for the right audience.

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Whatever is most important can, indeed must be measured…accurately and consistently., May 9, 2007

By Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) –
  

This review is from: Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master (Hardcover)

Obviously, it is highly desirable to measure what matters and that is especially true of marketing initiatives. Here’s the challenge which many (most?) readers will face after they finish reading this volume: Which metrics are the most appropriate for their specific organization? Co-authors Paul W. Farris, Neil T. Bendle, Phillip E. Pfeifer, and David J. Reibstein offer 50+ and in an ideal business world, every executive can – and will – master all of them. That is possible but highly unlikely. Fortunately, the authors offer a wealth of information and observations that can guide and inform the selection of those metrics that will enable executives to “gather and analyze basic market data, measure the core factors that drive their business models, analyze the profitability of individual customer accounts, and optimize resource allocation among increasingly fragmented media. To the authors’ substantial credit, they make effective use of a number of reader-friendly devices which enliven what would be an otherwise dull textbook and they do without compromising the integrity of research-driven insights which so many books on marketing lack. These devices include definitions, formulas, and brief descriptions of various metrics. They also include within individual chapters several sections, such as “Construction” (e.g. metrics issues concerning their formulation, application, interpretation, and strategic ramifications), “Data Sources, “Complications, and Cautions” (i.e. an analysis of the limitations of the metrics under consideration, and their potential inadequacies once executed), and “Related Metrics and Concepts” (briefly surveyed). This is by no means an “easy read” but will generously reward those who absorb and digest its material with appropriate rigor. Although I believe this volume can be of substantial value to executives in almost all organizations (regardless of size or nature), I think it will be of greatest benefit to those – probably in larger companies — who have an urgent need for accurate and consistent measurement of, for example, the dynamics behind their market share; the profitability of producing, pricing, selling, distributing, and servicing what they offer; and the ROI of marketing initiatives within the framework of enterprise financial metrics. Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson as well as Ram Charan’s Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don’t, Lynda Gratton’s Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy – And Others Don’t, Robert J. Herbold’s Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning, Jack Alexander’s Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation, and Michael Useem’s The Go Point: When It’s Time to Decide–Knowing What to Do and When to Do It.

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