Marketing Accountability: A New Take on the Culture Club

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association annual marketing conference, a talented group of over-the-counter pharma industry marketers, some of whom, are, in fact, clients of our agency.

The topic I was asked to address was loosely dubbed, “marketing accountability.”  And while I think my audience was expecting a presentation on ROI modeling of industry campaigns, instead I spoke about culture: a culture of marketing accountability, which I believe, is different than simply Return on Investment models.  Let me explain.

We live in a time when our clients are awash in data. And, of course, much of it is absolutely critical to understanding our customers, measuring the impact of our programs and spending.  And, as I said last week, there are some things that are relatively easy to measure. For example, a promotional coupon drop can be measured on how much incremental volume it drives in a very finite period. However, a flight of advertising is much more difficult to measure in terms of simply short-term ROI.  We are brand building; consequently some investments will have a cumulative impact, not just a one week return on investment.  Memorable campaigns have sticking power and brand-building power beyond the journal they ran in or a TV day part in which they are viewed. Consumers can still recall that Bayer Aspirin is “the wonder drug that works wonders” long after that campaign has evolved. Physicians tell us they can recall the Chantix brand exploding cigarette icon and what it means in terms of brand efficacy and power long after they have been exposed to the campaign.

That is not to say we can’t or shouldn’t measure our advertising messages and their impact. A best practice we recommend with all our clients is to test our positioning, our message hierarchy, and our execution. This gives us a longitudinal database of what powerful and persuasive messaging looks like in our categories. We can overlay this toolbox of metrics with things like brand awareness; and Brand Momentum, which is a unique Euro RSCG Life tool that, much like political polling techniques upon which it is built, measures saliency and trust for a collection of brands in real time to assess which brands are gaining and losing momentum in the category.  This metric overlays nicely with brand performance changes over time.

And finally, I encouraged the room full of marketers to look for, and demand, agency partners that will “put skin in the game” and be willing to be measured against agreed-uponmetrics. Marketing accountability is not just about ROI modeling. Marketing accountability is about brand managers and their agencies coming together to work through marketing and advertising challenges in a disciplined, measured way to ensure long-termbrand success.