Conversation Marketing Management is my blog; the place for a conversation about how marketing needs to change in order to be effective in the new business environment.
Below is the latest post from my blog at http://www.conversationmarketingmanagement.com
Conversation Marketing Management » The One Dollar Challenge
What is this small piece of paper worth? The piece of paper itself isn’t worth much. But it has the key characteristic required for a currency to be a good means of facilitating trade in an economy; universal acceptance as an accurate enough reflection of value.For decades, marketers kept their jobs and claimed “success” by using numbers like lift in awareness, favorability, purchase intent, conversion rate, etc. Like the piece of paper in your pocket, there is no inherent value in any of these items; they are just numbers on a piece of paper. But they served as the currency of exchange for the marketing economy because there was universal acceptance that those numbers reflected value accurately enough. Since the advent of an entirely new currency of digital numbers, that economic system has been under stress. As non-traditional media consumption begins to make up over one-third of media consumption (including TV watched through a device like DVR, digital OOH, etc.), the currency for conducting and evaluating marketing is near the breaking point.When the value of the underlying currency is in question, the entire economy is undermined. How do you know what to buy, and how much to pay or charge for it if you don’t know the value of the currency used in the exchange? Did I get a bargain or get screwed? Did I succeed or did I fail? Should I do more of what I did or less? How can I tell how to allocate my budget? Am I getting a return on my investment?Sound familiar?The marketing industry must come to some new valuation model; some common means of valuing the items we use to value our efforts. The problem is the conversation about what to do is polarized between traditionalists and digitalists.On one side, the traditionalists like their old numbers even though they know they can’t measure a large portion of their audiences’ media consumption or attitudes, or the impact of their marketing on those audiences. And the digitalists who are so tied to the minutia of ever-expanding spreadsheets they insist we have to constantly test, learn and optimize not only our marketing, but the entire system we use to measure our marketing. In other words, we either have to sacrifice accuracy for stability, or sacrifice stability (and scale) for accuracy. Completely black and white – the traditional way or the digital way.The reality is that the solution lies in a third way. A new way. A way that takes the best of both. We need the universal adoption of a newer, more modern, more flexible, yet stable currency. Until we get a newer measurement model that is more accurate, no one will accept it enough for it to become a stable currency around which we can again comfortably manage the marketing economy.Your thoughts? [Link]
