Global study: marketer's top three metrics are satisfaction, awareness, ROI
A fascinating new paper titled “Managerial Metric Use in Marketing Decisions” lead by UTS Business School researcher Dr Ofer Mintz gives a compelling insight into how cultural and cross-national differences impact on metrics usage for marketing decision marking – including the impact this can have on company performance.
Key points:
- The use of (and appetite for) different marketing metrics differ based on country and organisational culture point to a need to reduce ambiguity in multinational organisations.
- The three top metrics used by marketers across all countries within the study are satisfaction, awareness and ROI.
- Higher performing companies generally used more metrics; however, within this it is preferable to have an organic, freeflowing culture where there was flexibility for managers to exchange ideas and chose their own metrics.
- Lack of cross culture understanding on the approach to metrics may encourage the use of short term rather than long term performance metrics.
The research looks at at over 4,000 marketing decisions made across 16 different countries. Countries differed not only on the metrics they used to assess the different elements of their marketing but also the number of metrics they used. The nations with the highest number of metrics measured were South Korea, China and India with Japan, France and the U.S being bigger fans of a streamlined set of metrics.
Pleasingly, generally the metrics used for assessing traditional and digital advertising were primarily aligned with overall marketing metrics. However for some larger emerging markets (Indonesia, Brazil and Indonesia) performance metrics such as CPC (cost per click) came into the key metrics used.
As a fan of data-driven insights I was relieved to see that the greater the use of quantitative data and metrics resulted in better decision making and better returns for an organisation, as long as organisational flexibility and strong communication was embedded in the company culture.
For marketers, the most important takeaways are 1. reduce ambiguity on metrics not only across nations but across culturally different organisations (incredibly important with the number of mergers and acquisitions occurring) 2. don’t be afraid of using a lot of metrics - but similarity don’t be afraid of reviewing and refining them for different market conditions.
