Great Marketing Ruffles Feathers

Execs, here's what we marketers face:

Great marketing pleases everyone on the team, sooner or later. But at the beginning, great marketing pleases almost no one. At the beginning, great marketing is counter-intuitive, non-obvious, challenging and apparently risky. Of course your friends, shareholders, stakeholders and bosses won't like it. But they're not doing the marketing, you are.

Whether we're naming, positioning, or pricing your product, marketing is not common sense.

Comments

dan said…

Cauvin,

You seem to say that others will never like your marketing ideas, good or bad, so what metrics can they use to hold you accountable for good marketing?

Wed Jan 14, 09:20:00 AM 2009

Roger L. Cauvin said…

Fair question, Dan. I believe the original quote from Seth Godin holds part of the answer.

It states that great marketing eventually pleases everyone on the team. So some patience in measuring the marketer's performance is important.

As for the specific metrics, it depends on the nature of the marketing.

I have written that a 360 review of product managers is a good way of evaluating a product manager's performance.

For a marcom professional executing outbound campaigns and tactics, some of the standard forms of measurement make sense (e.g. setting up landing pages and measuring leads).

Note that, in both cases, the team must invest some initial trust in the marketer's efforts before measuring the results makes sense.

Wed Jan 14, 09:44:00 AM 2009

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