Unica Paper Gives Marketing Measurement Tips

If the wisdom of Plato can’t solve our marketing measurement problems, perhaps we can look to industry veteran Fred Chapman, currently with enterprise marketing software developer Unica. Fred recently gave a Webinar on Marketing Effectively on Your Terms and Your Time which did an excellent job laying out issues and solutions for today’s marketers. Follow-up materials included a white paper Building a Performance Measurement Culture in Marketing laying out ten steps toward improved marketing measurement.

The advice in the paper is reasonable, if fairly conventional: ensure sponsorship, articulate goals, identify important metrics, and so on. The paper also stresses the importance of having an underlying enterprise marketing system like, say, the one sold by Unica.

This is useful, so far as it goes. But it doesn't help with the real challenge of measurement projects, which is choosing metrics that support corporate strategies. So far, I haven’t come across a specific methodology for doing this. Most gurus seem to assume a flash of enlightenment will show each organization its own path. Perhaps organizations and strategies are all too different for any methodology to be more specific.

Relying on such insights suggests we have veered from Western rationalism to Eastern mysticism. I haven't yet seen a book "The Zen of Marketing Performance Measurement", but perhaps that's where we're headed.