Marketing Matters

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Metrics’

I spend about an hour in the car every day taking my son to playschool and listening to Phil Schaap on WKCR talk about jazz in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Not only does Schaap play great music, but he has insights into how the greats became household names and a lot of what he says is relevant to anyone interested in building brands.

The other day, Schaap mentioned that “Lester Young was on the charts when the charts mattered.”  Who knows what the #1 record is right now? And since the demise of the single, how is that even being measured? People used to know but they don’t anymore. The charts used to matter, but that was a long time ago.

That immediately got me thinking about our “marketing charts” – independent brand valuations. What’s the #1 brand in America right now? Can you make a good guess? There are three right answers, but do any of them matter?

I recently Twittered about an article that discussed the wild fluctuations of brand value as measured by Interbrand, Millward Brown, and Brand Finance. When such seemingly similar valuations aren’t comparable, what are we left with? When no one can agree on the basics, do our metrics matter?

When I listen to CMOs talk about metrics, they always confess that part of gauging success is “gut”. I don’t think anyone would actually call that a metric. Is that how we’re measuring our brand value, too? Is it just gut?

When we have three different answers and three different perspectives of rising or falling value and no way to bring them together into a coherent view of the market, we may not have anything better to rely on than gut. Marketers either have to find a way to combine those three perspectives to make one sensible brand value or ignore them all together. It would be nice, though, if we could find a way to make the charts matter.

In the meantime, I guess we can all just listen to Phil Schaap and Lester Young.