McKinsey On Measuring Marketing’s Worth

The smart folks over at McKinsey have a real winner in their most recent article on marketing, and it gets to the heart things every marketer should be asking themselves today. McKinsey author

• What exactly influences our consumers today?
• How well informed (really) is our marketing judgment?
• How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans?
• How are we coping with added complexity in the marketing organization?
• What metrics should we track given our (imperfect) options?

Some will scoff and claim those are the basics, but that’s the point: In a rapidly shifting marketing landscape, it’s hard to do better than just being consistently brilliant at the basics.

As they sum up:

The marketing environment continues to change rapidly and often feels like a moving target that’s impossible to hit. It’s genuinely difficult to overemphasize the magnitude of the change or the challenge. Yet time and time again, we find that marketers who have good answers to the five basic questions are better equipped to do battle for the effectiveness of marketing and to win the war for growth.

Go read it. (You’ll need to register on the site, but it’s free.)