This is the first in a series on sustainable marketing measurement, code name Metrics Monday. Today: An introduction.
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“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” –management meme, source unknown, possibly Peter Drucker or Robert Kaplan
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” –Albert Einstein
“Organizations exist to create value, and not all value can be monetized.” –Bob Lieberman
For way too long now I’ve steered clear of discussing sustainable marketing metrics. With this new series I aim to put the matter to rest, or preferably up for lively discussion.
The three quotes above hint at some of the larger points weaving this series together. As an archetypal industrial-age business discipline, marketing requires metrics. The post-industrial age demands a different approach, one anchored in more subjective measures of quality, value, and impact. Furthermore, the obsession with metrics leads to the measurement of things that don’t matter. Finally, marketing done from the sustainability mindset requires, not disposing of metrics altogether, but measuring with a different set of metrics and from a new, human-centric mindset.
This series will explore several themes:
- Extrinsic vs. intrinsic, or instrumental vs. expressive metrics. Do you work toward achieving some externally-imposed goals, or do you do business for the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself? How do you measure marketing done for its own sake?
- Process vs. outcome metrics: There’s a difference between measuring the what and the how of process and measuring the change or impact of outcomes. What difference are your marketing activities making in the world?
- Quantitative vs. qualitative metrics. On counting beans and evaluating what can and cannot — or, should and should not — be counted.
- Brand-centric vs. stakeholder-centric metric. You usually set out to measure your marketing efforts for your own or your company’s benefit. What if you measured the effect of your marketing program on your stakeholders instead?
- Financial + social + environmental metrics aka the Triple Bottom Line. From financial metrics, I’ll explore Return On Investment, where the continuing debate around ROI of social media will be particularly helpful, offering transferable lessons. In social metrics, I’ll tackle social return on investment (SROI). And I tackled measuring environmental impact of marketing in the just-concluded series on improving environmental sustainability of marketing communications.
- Linear vs. systems metrics. What you typically measure in marketing is uni-directional and growth-oriented, suitable for an old-school linear enterprise. Sustainability requires measurement from the systems-thinking perspective — the cyclical and relational metrics.
- The Hawthorne Effect. What is measured changes itself in response to being measured, rendering measurement imprecise at best.
- Externalities. Externalities must be factored in the true cost and benefit of marketing, as well as business overall.
- The micropower of measurement, or the metrics discourse. Hard to say where this one will lead, but I do subscribe to some of Michel Foucault’s theory of discourses and how they shape our reality. We must break out of the “limits of acceptable speech” in discussing and applying marketing and business metrics. In marketing metrics, too, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.
What have I missed? Have you been thinking about new marketing metrics, and if so, what would you like to discuss in the Metrics Monday series?
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Image credits: aussiegal and impactmatt
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Measurement & management quote is from Jack Welsh
Happy Monday!
@Mario: Hmm, thanks. I’ve been digging around and the most specific attribution I could find was that it’s unclear who said it first. It sure has been repeated over and over, though!
To be sustainable marketing has to produce positive and avoid negative results. To know which is which, improve the former and minimise the latter, some method of monitoring, analysis and judgement criteria is required. This implies appropriate metrics for the task even if these are conceptual rather than real.
This helps to ensure the task at hand is achieved successfully, lessons learned and appropriate plans put in place for future activities.
However, a world driven by metrics is is an improved version of yesterday’s world (adaptive) rather than a different world (disruptive). In sustainability terms, that may mean slightly lower energy use, waste materials or GHG emissions but hardly a paradigm shift.
Just as people generally benefit from distractions from the day to day, so organisations can benefit from looking beyond the numbers and considering what might be. Allocating a proportion of resource to genuine attempts at innovation is what enables some organisations / individuals to produce disruptive change for the better. While this implies a release from metrics it is inevitable that comparison with the status quo will be required to develop these ideas to reality so measurement rears its head again.
The art must be, to be able to step into and out of the measured world at will so enabling a balance between a flow of new ideas and activities that pay the bills.
I think Einstein had it with ‘not everything…’
Steve
@Steve: Thanks for the comment. “Appropriate metrics” is totally what I’m going for in this series. I like the distinction between adaptive and disruptive — it seems to me, too, we need disruptive metrics at this point.