Product Description

Few marketers recognize the extraordinary range of metrics now available for evaluating their strategies and tactics. In Marketing Metrics, four leading researchers and consultants systematically introduce today's most powerful marketing metrics.  The authors show how to use a "dashboard" of metrics to view market dynamics from various perspectives, maximize accuracy, and "triangulate" to optimal solutions. Their comprehensive coverage includes measurements of promotional strategy, advertising, and distribution; customer perceptions; market share; competitors' power; margins and profits; products and portfolios; customer profitability; sales forces and channels; pricing strategies; and more.  You'll learn how and when to apply each metric, and understand tradeoffs and nuances that are critical to using them successfully. The authors also demonstrate how to use marketing metrics as leading indicators, identifying crucial new opportunities and challenges. For clarity and simplicity all calculations can be performed by hand, or with basic spreadsheet techniques. In coming years, few marketers will rise to senior executive levels without deep fluency in marketing metrics. This book is the fastest, easiest way to gain that fluency.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #234131 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review
"In a category that suffers from a surfeit of books related to personal experiences, one-off success stories made possible by budgets and resources unavailable to most firms, outdated theories as quaint as bloodletting, or mantras devoted to 'big ideas' or 'exceeding expectations,' 50+ metrics crackles like new money. For CEOs and those in marketing trenches needing accountability, this is the best marketing book of the year." -- Nick Wreden, Strategy + Business

From the Back Cover

Few marketers recognize the extraordinary range of metrics now available for evaluating their strategies and tactics. In Marketing Metrics, four leading researchers and consultants systematically introduce today's most powerful marketing metrics.  The authors show how to use a "dashboard" of metrics to view market dynamics from various perspectives, maximize accuracy, and "triangulate" to optimal solutions. Their comprehensive coverage includes measurements of promotional strategy, advertising, and distribution; customer perceptions; market share; competitors' power; margins and profits; products and portfolios; customer profitability; sales forces and channels; pricing strategies; and more.  You'll learn how and when to apply each metric, and understand tradeoffs and nuances that are critical to using them successfully. The authors also demonstrate how to use marketing metrics as leading indicators, identifying crucial new opportunities and challenges. For clarity and simplicity all calculations can be performed by hand, or with basic spreadsheet techniques. In coming years, few marketers will rise to senior executive levels without deep fluency in marketing metrics. This book is the fastest, easiest way to gain that fluency.

About the Author

Paul W. Farris is Landmark Communications Professor and Professor of Marketing at The Darden Graduate Business School, University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1980. Professor Farris’ research has produced award-winning articles on retail power and measurement of advertising effects. He has published many marketing articles in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, and Marketing Science. Farris is currently working on methods for integrating and improving marketing metrics. He is author or co-author of several books, including Advertising Budgeting: A Report from the Field. Farris’ consulting clients range from Procter & Gamble, to Apple and IBM. Before moving to Virginia, he taught marketing at the Harvard Business School and also has worked in product management for Unilever, Germany and account management for the LINTAS advertising agency. He is a current and past board member for several U.S and international companies.

Neil T. Bendle is a Ph.D. student in marketing at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He holds an MBA from Darden, and has nearly a decade’s experience in marketing management, consulting, business systems improvement, and financial management. Bendle was responsible for measuring the success of marketing campaigns for the UK’s Labour Party.

Phillip E. Pfeifer, Alumni Research Professor of Business Administration at The Darden Graduate Business School, currently specializes in interactive marketing. He has published a popular MBA textbook and over 25 refereed articles in journals such as the Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Database Marketing, Decision Sciences, and the Journal of Forecasting. Pfeifer was recognized in 2004 as the Darden School’s faculty leader in external case sales. His teaching has won student awards and been recognized inBusiness Week’s Guide to the Best Business Schools. His recent clients include Circuit City, Procter & Gamble, and CarMax.

David J. Reibstein is the William Stewart Woodside Professor and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School. His research focuses on marketing metrics and their link to financial consequences, competitive marketing strategy, market segmentation, brand choice, and product line breadth. He has been published in every major marketing journal and has authored or co-authored numerous books. He served as the Executive Director of the Marketing Sciences Institute, and co-founded Wharton’s CMO Summit. Reibstein architected and teaches the Wharton Executive Education course on marketing metrics. He consults with leading businesses, including GE, Shell Oil, HP, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Major League Baseball. He has served as Vice Dean and Director of Wharton’s Graduate Division, as visiting professor at Stanford and INSEAD, and as faculty member at Harvard. Reibstein was the co-founder of Shopzilla, one of the first product search engines, and serves on several corporate boards.

Customer Reviews

Whatever is most important can, indeed must be measured...accurately and consistently.

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.