CMO ... CYA

VisionEdge Marketing has been surveying MPM (Marketing Performance Management) issues for several years. Their 2009 report, "Closing the Gap Between Marketing and Business" addresses some of the issues in my recent post that CMOs need company-wide support.

The pressure is on CMOs to use MPM tools as a means to run Marketing/Advertising more efficiently.... get more science than art ... more ROI than CYA. The answer lies in assessing the right activities - not being inundated with all the data.

In Summary:

1. Marketing has a long road to align with the core business, measurement and accountability.
   
2. Marketing departments lack the skills (and company commitment) to run themselves like a business
3. They need to measure more customer-centric info like retention (as much as acquisition).

Laura Patterson exclaimed that"Marketers have to plan for expected results measured in business terms -- leads, revenues, share or market, margin contribution or repeat customers. Measuring the efficiency of the production process or the cost-per calculations of media efficiency are secondary. "

We are in the early stages of Marketing issues being tied to larger BPM (Business Process Management) solutions. Case in point is that neither Gartner or Forrester assess MPM specifically.