Decision-Making & Analytics
HOW SMART FIRMS WILL MEASURE MARKETING . by Laura Chamberlain M arketing faces an existential credibility problem, but not the one most people think. The issue isn’t that we can’t measure marketing’s impact. It’s that we’re measuring the wrong things brilliantly, whilst ignoring what actually matters.
Customers make decisions messily and emotionally over time, influenced by touchpoints we’ll never perfectly attribute. When we pretend marketing can deliver the same predictive precision as physics or chemistry, we set ourselves up for failure. The answer isn’t more data or louder advocacy. It’s critical thinking. We need to stop apologising for complexity. Leadership teams get frustrated when marketers say: “It depends.” But sometimes that’s the right answer. The problem isn’t saying so, it’s how we say it and what happens next. Consider a marketing director who has been asked why they are recommending £100,000 for brand building when performance marketing could generate 500 qualified leads. If they say, “Well, it depends on our goals”, it is likely they will leave with a reduced budget and less influence. But if they reply, “It depends on several factors, and I’ve worked through all of them for our specific situation”, before providing a reasoned argument and a clear explanation of how performance will be evaluated, the outcome is likely to be different. Sophisticated businesses are recognising that relentless quarter- by-quarter performance marketing is destroying the brand equity that drives sustainable growth.
They’re measuring marketing value, not just activity. This means tracking brand health alongside conversion rates, measuring customer lifetime value rather than just acquisition costs, and evaluating effectiveness before obsessing over efficiency. This requires change on both sides. I’m working to help marketers develop better frameworks for demonstrating real value, moving beyond vanity metrics. At the same time, leadership teams need to stop demanding impossible certainty and start engaging with the strategic complexity that effective marketing requires. For marketers, this requires backwards from business outcomes to marketing approaches. Start by agreeing what marketing should influence (revenue growth, retention, market share, brand value), then identify what marketing needs to do to influence those outcomes. Second, the discipline of examining your own assumptions and actively seeking evidence that might challenge your view, not just evidence that confirms it. Third, the ability to translate three specific capabilities. First, the ability to work strategic decisions into language that makes sense for colleagues who don’t share your marketing vocabulary. The businesses that embrace this approach will have a significant advantage.
Walk into any marketing team and you’ll find people drowning in data. Click-through rates, impression counts, engagement metrics, cost per acquisition: we track it all obsessively. Yet when asked to demonstrate marketing’s value to the business, many marketers struggle to move beyond activity metrics to articulate genuine business impact. As one marketing director said to me: “We’ve got world- class dashboards answering the wrong questions.” The root of the problem lies in a demand for false precision. Chief Finance Officers want to know exactly which pound will return four pounds. Marketers, desperate to prove their worth, have responded by optimising for what’s measurable rather than what matters. The result? We’re cannibalising long-term brand value for short- term performance metrics, measuring efficiency whilst losing sight of effectiveness. This approach ignores something
important: marketing works on humans, not algorithms.
wbs.ac.uk | Warwick Business School
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