PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

All kinds of articles this year have stood up to be counted on the topic of measurement. Executives, especially CFOs, want marketing to be more and more accountable. A good recent piece on CMOs in strategy + business ranks accountability second only to putting the consumer at the heart of marketing.

At PJA, our clients are following and (we hope) driving this trend toward measuring campaign effectiveness. At the end of this week I had a conversation with a client for a campaign that is not even approved yet, and we discussed the following metrics for the first six months of the program:

General awareness measured through:
• quick polls
• registrations for the client’s thought leadership site (where every click is measured and added to the visitor’s profile and interaction score, ultimately resulting in touches to the customer when they meet pre-defined thresholds)
• media hits
• association sponsorship growth
• increased speaking invitations for thought leaders within the company
• Roper Starch surveys for publication ad placements
• responses, confirmations, attendance and follow-up for co-sponsored roundtables
• blog readership and responses
• direct mail responses, scheduled meetings and related sales activity

Sales activity measured through:
• increase in number of sales rep presentations (measured through quick poll outreach to sales force)
• shift in prospect and customer conversations from product-based to solution-based in each key solutions area
• participation of customers and hot prospects in co-sponsored roundtables

Employee awareness and advocacy measured through:
• interactive lunch and learn game and role play events, pre- and post-event testing
• media trainings completed, all levels
• executive trainings completed, executive level
• sales requests for solution-based materials generated for new campaign

And this is just for the first six months! If we can really get sign-off for the budget required to realize these measures and pull off a dashboard based on all these measures (a dashboard that may look more the cockpit of an A380), we will have hit one of PJA’s strategic goals straight down the middle: Unassailable Program Value. Which in my mind is French for, If you can’t measure it, should you even include it?

I’ll provide an update on where this program stands as soon as the CEO fires the starting gun. Should be interesting, and very measurable.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Marketing, Measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.