Download A better way to measure marketing return on investment

Executive Development Programs
A better way to measure marketing return on investment
Executive Development Programs at the University of New Hampshire
offers The Big Picture Framework as three-day Open Enrollment course
The 4 B’s replace the 4 P’s of marketing when you take The Big Picture
approach. The 4 B’s provide a better metric to judge marketing return on investment, MROI.
Here’s why.
If you are a marketing or sales manager, you are probably hearing, “Focus on growth!” from the
strategic planners in your organization. You spend your days working on the problem, How Do I
Get Growth?
The impediments to growth are familiar to you.
--You work in a complex market where there are a variety of actors. There are regulators,
providers or payers, customers, partner companies, competitor companies, and so on. Sorting
through all of that can be difficult.
--You’re faced with a low information-to-data ratio, trying to
make decisions with either too much “big data”, too little “big
data,” or just poorly organized data.
--There’s an abundance of marketing tools, from social media
tools to analytics tools. You spend a lot of your time deciding
which tool to use and learning how to use them.
--And unless you’re in the minority, you have no marketing
seat at the table. It’s hard to advocate for the initiatives
marketing should be leading when you have no voice.
Dr. Marta Dapena-Baron, Presidentr
Big Picture Partners
Despite the impediments, you are tasked with tracking and reporting MROI.
You’re probably using the preferred method of: “What we put in < What we got out.”
But there are two big problems with the preferred method of measuring financial results.
The first is a measurement problem. Measurement doesn’t always give you the right answer
because measuring sales and marketing is… challenging. You can end up axing valuable
programs because you can’t track them well.
The second is a learning problem. You can’t learn how to improve when you’re using the wrong
metrics to measure.
Enter the 4 B’s.
Bodies. Beliefs. Behaviors. Bucks.
The 4 B’s give us a better way to approach measurement and MROI.
Bodies: Who our target audience is. Do we have the right target audience? It’s measuring and
managing our leads.
Beliefs: This is what we are doing in marketing that is important to the Bodies, the target
audience. And it’s how our audience perceives our brand. If you are managing
marketing, you are managing customer beliefs.
Behaviors: To measure MROI, we only have to pay attention to beliefs that cause a behavioral
change in our customers. For instance, we can focus on customers of our competitor.
We want to attract them by either taking advantage of something they’re dissatisfied with
or by creating dissatisfaction where no dissatisfaction exists.
Marketing is in charge of making things important to customers.
Sales is in charge of managing the customer behavior change, getting a customer to try
our products and services, repeat purchases, etc.
Using a Big Picture Marketing tool called “Importance Ratings” that manage the
perceptions of a brand and create differentiation, you first make things important that
you can manage and then you can deliver on those things.
Bucks: If sales and marketing are aligned, the handoff between beliefs and behaviors happens
seamlessly and results in Bucks.
We do a lot of marketing measurement about the last B, bucks.
But we don’t do good measurement of beliefs and behaviors.
That is particularly true in B2B companies.
The Beliefs and Behaviors are what we call “leading indicators of
performance.” How your customers think about your brand and
how they act. That drives financial results.
Whereas Bucks, that’s a “lagging indicator of performance.”
So, we’re sort of measuring the wrong thing, in organizations. The 4 B’s use both leading and
lagging performance indicators to analyze opportunities in front of us and also to evaluate our
performance.
It looks simplistic, but it’s really a very powerful tool.
Marketing Strategy: The Big Picture. You can learn more at in an open enrollment executive
development program at the University of New Hampshire’s Peter T. Paul College of Business
and Economics. This is the only open enrollment program for the Big Picture framework in
America. Instructors are Dr. Marta Dapena-Baron, President of Big Picture Partners and
Dr. Thomas Gruen, chair and professor of marketing at UNH.
The Big Picture approach works for large and small organizations as well as non-profits and
service industries.
Class runs Wednesday November 12 to Friday, November 14. Fee is $3,300. To register, go to
http://paulcollege.unh.edu/executive-education/open-enrollment-programs/marketing-strategybig-picture
Adapted from a webinar by Marta Dapena-Baron
The Big Picture Partners’ approach to aligning business strategy with marketing strategy and
execution resonates particularly well with MBA and Executive audiences, and has become the
standard language at major corporations including Johnson & Johnson, GE, Ecolab, and others.
Visit www.bigpicturepartners.com for additional information!
The Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics offers a full complement of high-quality
programs in business, economics, accounting, finance, information systems management,
entrepreneurship, marketing, and hospitality management at UNH. Programs are offered at the
undergraduate, graduate, and executive development levels. The college is accredited by the
Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the premier accrediting agency for
business schools worldwide. For more information, visit paulcollege.unh.edu
The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university
with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is
the state's flagship public institution, enrolling 12,300 undergraduate and 2,200 graduate students.
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