Marketing Planning and Marketing Measurement: Surprisingly Separate

As part of my continuing research into marketing performance measurement, I’ve been looking at software vendors who provide marketing planning systems. I haven’t found any products that do marketing planning by itself. Instead, the function is part of larger systems. In order of increasing scope, these fall into three groups:

Marketing resource management:
- Aprimo
- MarketingPilot
- Assetlink
- Orbis Australian; active throughout Asia; just opened London office)
- MarketingCentral
- Xeed (Dutch; active throughout Europe)

Enterprise marketing:
- Unica
- SAS
- Teradata
- Alterian

Enterprise management:
- SAP
- Oracle/Siebel
- Infor

Few companies would buy an enterprise marketing or enterprise management system solely for its marketing planning module. Even marketing resource management software is primarily bought for other functions (mostly content management and program management). This makes sense in that most marketing planning comes down to aggregating information about the marketing programs that reside in these larger systems.

Such aggregations include comparisons across time periods, of budgets against actuals, and of different products and regions against each other. These are great for running marketing operations but don’t address larger strategic issues such as impact of marketing on customer attitudes or company value. Illustrating this connection requires analytical input from tools such as marketing mix models or business simulations. This is provided by measurement products like Upper Quadrant , Veridiem (now owned by SAS) and MMA Avista. Presumably we’ll see closer integ/ration between the two sets of products over time.