The Marketing Leaders - The Dangers of Marketing by Dashboard

'THE marketing leaders ^TM’ publisher gives a very frank account of the dangers of ‘marketing by dashboard’, which can create hollow promises. But why? Let’s examine this case…

The promise of being able to see at a glance how the department and function of marketing are performing, and make clear immediate in-line improvements based on evidential rational is appealing. It is however often a hollow promise in my opinion. Worse than that, the act of pursuing a vision of management by dashboard could make your situation an awful lot worse. In our experience the solution to a successful dashboard is also the key to success is a sufficient, whole system of thinking and the active participation of all stakeholders in its creation.

Like many of the most important phrases in the business improvement lexicon such as ‘culture’ and ‘CRM’, the term ‘Marketing Dashboard’ means a lot of different things depending on who you ask.

For clarity I’m referring to a performance management and measurement tool that summarises the key aspects of the sales and marketing performance of the organisation - sort of like a balanced scorecard for marketing departments. In that sense the marketing dashboard is nothing new. What is new is the ability of technologies such as CRM and web-analytics to interface with the dashboard in real time to give a clearer and more accurate picture of marketing performance than ever before, and for the dashboard itself to do some quite sophisticated number crunching and cross-referencing of key statistics. This is to improve both the meaning of the results, their actionability and hence their usefulness.

The problem I have with the Marketing dashboard is much like the problem with the balanced scorecard. The creators of the balanced scorecard, Kaplan & Norton, acknowledged in the publication of their latest book “Strategy Maps” published by Harvard Business School in 2004, that while a measurement system may be balanced, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is relevant or appropriate. Or that it is measuring the right things. The old saying “Show me how I’m measured, and I’ll show you how I behave,” certainly holds true.

The fact is that there are many pressures in the business environment that lead to the odds being resoundingly stacked against you when it comes to choosing the right measurements. Here’s a quick self-assessment. Are your most important marketing performance measurements things like:

If you answered yes, then chances are your organisation is under extreme pressure to deliver short-term targets and results, even at the expense of medium to long-term success and sustainability. Does this sound familiar? I’m not saying these measures don’t have their place, but Bipedal’s work on organisational improvement planning has shown that in all but a tiny proportion of organisations the measurements above aren’t the most important metrics of marketing success. Worse than that, when taken in isolation they actually lead to wrong behaviours and self-destructive outcomes.

Our work has shown just how dangerous and self-defeating wrong measurements can be. Where measurements such as those above, are designed to ensure that not a penny of marketing spend is wasted and maximum efficiency is derived from the marketing department, that is what is delivered: departmental efficiency, not effectiveness, not the alignment of the company with customer needs, not the deep understanding of the customer’s world, not developing sustainable growth or competitiveness over the long term, just local, short term, departmental efficiency.

Other symptoms that indicate your company may have the wrong measurements are things like budgets being fully tied up months, often years in advance, little or no room for experimentation or taking advantage of new opportunities, recruitment geared to getting more from junior and inexperienced staff, improvement is focused around standardisation, simplification and adoption of industry benchmarks, etc, yukk! Where’s the added-value? We might as well outsource marketing to a cheaper offshore location.

If you get your dashboard right however you can expect your organisation to become increasingly customer centric, for the firm to concentrate on customer satisfaction and advocacy over one-off or unsustainable cost reductions, marketing budgets to be tightly linked to attainment of agreed mid-long term strategic goals, and core purpose to be understood in terms of marketing outcomes – in other words Shareholder Value to be largely derived from marketing achievement.

What might that mean for you personally? You may be surprised and delighted as the changes become embedded. Your epiphany might come when someone from operations, or finance tells you of their creative ideas to deliver real customer outcomes without reference to the usual low-level enhancements to units of input or output. Before long the Chief starts delegating key parts of organisational development and strategy to those that demonstrate the greatest marketing leadership. There’s no way to outsource true marketing leadership - you are handed your opportunity to shine! This is a nirvana we can all reach with adult more than just teen spirit.

To answer that question we first have to ask why we are trying to measure things. More often than not, it will be in order to make things better, and improve the status quo. Complex organisations have complex problems, so how do you know where to start making improvements and what priority to give to the various improvement options and activities?

Any system is only as strong as its weakest point so it makes sense to start by finding and addressing the weakest link in the chain. If there isn’t robustness to the strategic thinking and process that underpins your dashboard you may find that like a car dashboard it tells you that all is well with the engine temperature and so on, but it has no way to tell you that you would be much better off choosing a different destination!

To establish the correct destination of travel, you’re going to have to figure out what you want, and why you want it, and in what order of priority do you want it over other possible options. Clearly this vision has to be centred around the customer’s world or it will not survive contact with the reality of the market place. In fact you are probably going to have to know the customer’s world as well as they do, if not better. Many companies would claim to be able to do this with respect to their particular product or service, but are completely unaware of their blind spots due to not being able to see their customers’ needs in the round.

More than just understanding the customer’s needs however, you’re going to have to know how your product or service impacts on the customer’s world. What value does it have, how difficult or easy is it to extract that value, what knock-on effects come from having or not having your product or service.

Easier said than done you might say. There is an easy way to have all of this however. Bipedal have developed a methodology that delivers exactly that. What we have found in our work helping organisations of all shapes and sectors, such as Financial Services, Utilities, Government, B2B and B2C, to achieve better alignment with their customers’ needs, almost without exception, we find the problems of the day that all organisations work hard to solve, are almost always underpinned by a more fundamental issue. In a sense they are trying very hard to fix the problem by tackling its symptoms rather than its cause. A lot of energy and money is expended in doing this, and the results are moderate at best, counter-productive or incredibly damaging at worst.

By identifying the linkages between problems and their emergent properties it is possible to develop powerful insights that enable you to be develop a clarity of vision of how the organisation can literally make a step-change improvement in its performance towards its goals.

These are more than just powerful techniques that deliver simple and rapid results to making a genuine step-change towards customer alignment and performance. It is the outcomes of this systematic focus on internal and external needs and the steps towards addressing them that form the foundation to a robust and well thought-through dashboard.

By working in a structured way with your senior colleagues you will find you identify your organisation’s underpinning problem to build a common vision, make a robust and obvious business case, and straight-forward plan of action. Everyone can buy into the solution because everyone has shaped the outcome from first principles, and obvious solutions are made obvious to everyone involved so that even Chief Execs can understand the real issues! Marketing is given its rightful opportunity to shine at last. What can be more important than working on your most important issue? You can do it yourself or with outside facilitation, but most of all do it, and do it now!

By Paul MacDonald
Managing Director of Bipedal Ltd:
(Paul MacDonald is the publisher of this magazine.)

Happy Xmas and Happy New Year from Bipedal and The Marketing Leaders’ editorial and advertising team! 2007 looks even more promising for Marketing and Marketers, at least where THE marketing leaders ^TM is concerned. Your community is gearing up for 2007, introducing a raft of new value in the form of:



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