Demystifying social media

As the marketing power of social media grows, it no longer makes sense to treat it as an experiment. Heres how senior leaders can harness social media to shape consumer decision making in predictable ways.
APRIL 2012 Roxane Divol, David Edelman, and Hugo Sarrazin Source: Marketing & Sales Practice

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Exhibit: Social media enables targeted marketing responses at individual touch points along the consumer decision journey. About the author Comments (22)

Executives certainly know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the worlds third largest, behind China and India. Executives can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify word-of-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social medias power. Companies diligently establish Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages, but few have a deep understanding of exactly how social media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender loyalty. We believe there are two interrelated reasons why social media remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle for many executives, particularly nonmarketers. The first is its seemingly nebulous nature. Its no secret that consumers increasingly go online to discuss products and brands, seek advice, and offer guidance. Yet its often difficult to see where and how to influence these conversations, which take place across an evergrowing variety of platforms, among diverse and dispersed communities, and may occur either with lightning speed or over the course of months. Second, theres no single measure of social medias financial impact, and many companies find that its difficult to justify devoting significant resourcesfinancial or humanto an activity whose precise effect remains unclear. What we hope to do here is to demystify social media. We have identified its four primary functionsto monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behaviorand linked them to the journey consumers undertake when making purchasing decisions. Being able to identify exactly how, when, and where social media influences consumers helps executives to craft marketing strategies that take advantage of social medias unique ability to engage with customers. It should also help leaders develop, launch, and demonstrate the financial impact of social-media campaigns (for insight into the worlds biggest socialmedia market, see Understanding social media in China). In short, todays chief executive can no longer treat social media as a side activity run solely by managers in marketing or public relations. Its much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help CEOs and other top executives evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance-management systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence. Companies that have these three elements in place can create critical new brand assets (such as content from customers or insights from their feedback), open up new channels for interactions (Twitter-based customer service, Facebook news feeds), and completely reposition a brand through the way its employees interact with customers or other parties.

The social consumer decision journey

Companies have quickly learned that social media works: 39 percent of companies weve surveyed already use social-media services as their primary digital tool to reach customers, and that percentage is expected to rise to 47 percent within the next four years.1 Fueling this growth is a growing list of success stories from mainstream companies: Creating buzz: Eighteen months before Ford reentered the US subcompact-car market with its Fiesta model, it began a broad marketing campaign called the Fiesta Movement. A major element involved giving 100 social-media influencers a European model of the car, having them complete missions, and asking them to document their experiences on various social channels. Videos related to the Fiesta campaign generated 6.5 million views on YouTube, and Ford received 50,000 requests for information about the vehicle, primarily from non-Ford drivers. When it finally became available to the public, in late 2010, some 10,000 cars sold in the first six days. Learning from customers: PepsiCo has used social networks to gather customer insights via its DEWmocracy promotions, which have led to the creation of new varieties of its Mountain Dew brand. Since 2008, the company has sold more than 36 million cases of them. Targeting customers: Levi Strauss has used social media to offer location-specific deals. In one instance, direct interactions with just 400 consumers led 1,600 people to turn up at the companys stores an example of social medias word-of-mouth effect. Yet countless others have failed to match these successes: knowing that something works and understanding how it works are very different things. As the number of companies with Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, or online communities continues to grow, we think its time for leaders to remind themselves how social media connects with an organizations broader marketing mission. Marketings primary goal is to reach consumers at the moments, or touch points, that influence their purchasing behavior. Almost three years ago, our colleagues proposed a frameworkthe consumer decision journeyfor understanding how consumers interact with companies during purchase decisions.2 Expressing consumer behavior as a winding journey with multiple feedback loops, this new framework was different from the traditional description of consumer purchasing behavior as a linear march through a funnel. Social media is a unique component of the consumer decision journey: its the only form of marketing that can touch consumers at each and every stage, from when theyre pondering brands and products right through the period after a purchase, as their experience influences the brands they prefer and their potential advocacy influences others.

A social journey For more on social medias relationship to the consumer decision journey, explore this interactive exhibit narrated by coauthor David Edelman.

The fact that social media can influence customers at every stage of the journey doesnt mean that it should. Depending on the company and industry, some touch points are more important to competitive advantage than others.3 Whats more, our work with dozens of companies adapting to the new marketing environment strongly suggests that the most powerful social-media strategies focus on a limited number of marketing responses closely related to individual touch points along the consumer decision journey. The ten most important responses, range from providing customer service to fostering online

communities (exhibit). One of those tenmonitoring what people say about your brandis so important that we see it as a core function of social media, relevant across the entire consumer decision journey. The remaining nine responses, organized in three clusters in the exhibit, underpin efforts to use social media to respond to consumer comments, to amplify positive sentiment and activity, and to lead changes in the behavior and mind-sets of consumers.

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1. Monitor Gatorade, a sports drink manufactured by PepsiCo, has been diligently working toward its goal of becoming the largest participatory brand in the world.4 It has created a Chicago-based war room within its marketing department to monitor the brand in real time across social media. There are seats where team members can track custom-built data visualizations and dashboards (including terms related

to the brand, sponsored athletes, and competitors) and run sentiment analyses around product and campaign launches. Every day, all of this feedback is integrated into products and marketingfor example, by helping to optimize the landing page on the companys Web site. Since the war rooms creation, the average traffic to Gatorades online properties, the length of visitor interactions, and viral sharing from campaigns have all more than doubled. Such brand monitoringsimply knowing whats said online about your products and servicesshould be a default social-media function, taking place constantly. Even without engaging consumers directly, companies can glean insights from an effective monitoring program that informs everything from product design to marketing and provides advance warning of potentially negative publicity. Its also critical to communicate such feedback within the business quickly: whoever is charged with brand monitoring must ensure that information reaches relevant functions, such as communications, design, marketing, public relations, or risk. 2. Respond Valuable though it is to learn how you are doing and what to improve, broad and passive monitoring is only a start. Pinpointing conversations for responding at a personal level is another form of social-media engagement. This kind of response can certainly be positive if its done to provide customer service or to uncover sales leads. Most often, though, responding is a part of crisis management. Last year, for example, a hoax photograph posted online claimed that McDonalds was charging AfricanAmericans an additional service fee. The hoax first appeared on Twitter, where the image rapidly went viral just before the weekend as was retweeted with the hashtag #seriouslymcdonalds. It turned out to be a working weekend for the McDonalds social-media team. On Saturday, the companys director of social media released a statement through Twitter declaring the photograph to be a hoax and asking key influencers to please let your followers know. The company continued to reinforce that message throughout the weekend, even responding personally to concerned Tweeters. By Sunday, the number of people who believed the image to be authentic had dwindled, and McDonalds stock price rose 5 percent the following day. Responding in order to counter negative comments and reinforce positive ones will only increase in importance. The responsibility for taking action may fall on functions outside marketing, and the message will differ depending on the situation. No response can be quick enough, and the ability to act rapidly requires the constant, proactive monitoring of social mediaon weekends too. By responding rapidly, transparently, and honestly, companies can positively influence consumer sentiment and behavior. 3. Amplify Amplification involves designing your marketing activities to have an inherently social motivator that spurs broader engagement and sharing. This approach means more than merely reaching the end of planning a marketing campaign and then thinking that we should do something socialsay, uploading a television commercial to YouTube. It means that the core concepts for campaigns must invite customers into an experience that they can choose to extend by joining a conversation with the brand, product, fellow users, and other enthusiasts. It means having ongoing programs that share new content with customers and provide opportunities for sharing back. It means offering experiences that customers will feel great about sharing, because they gain a badge of honor by publicizing content that piques the interest of others. In the initial phases of the consumer decision journey, when consumers sift through brands and products to determine their preferred options, referrals and recommendations are powerful social-media tools. A simple example is the way online deal sites such as Groupon and Gilt Groupe provide consumers with

credit for each first-time purchaser they refer. Our research shows that such direct recommendations from peers generate engagement rates some 30 times higher than traditional online advertising does. Once a consumer has decided which product to buy and makes a purchase, companies can use social media to amplify their engagement and foster loyalty. When Starbucks wanted to increase awareness of its brand, for example, it launched a competition challenging users to be the first to tweet a photograph of one of the new advertising posters that the company had placed in six major US cities, providing winners with a $20 gift card. This social-media brand advocacy effort delivered a marketing punch that significantly outweighed its budget. Starbucks said that the effort was the difference between launching with millions of dollars versus millions of fans.5 Marketers also can foster communities around their brands and products, both to reinforce the belief of consumers that they made a smart decision and to provide guidance for getting the most from a purchase. Software company Intuit, for example, launched customer service forums for its Quicken and QuickBooks personal-finance software so users could help one another with product issues. The result? Users rather than Intuit employees answer about 80 percent of the questions, and the company has employed user comments to make dozens of significant changes to its software. 4. Lead Social media can be used most proactively to lead consumers toward long-term behavioral changes. In the early stages of the consumer decision journey, this may involve boosting brand awareness by driving Web traffic to content about existing products and services. When grooming-products group Old Spice introduced its Old Spice Man character to viewers, during the US National Football Leagues 2010 Super Bowl, for example, the companys ambition was to increase its reach and relevance to both men and women. The commercial became a phenomenon: starring former player Isaiah Mustafa, it got more than 19 million hits across all platforms, and year-on-year sales for the companys products jumped by 27 percent within six months. Marketers also can use social media to generate buzz through product launches, as Ford did in launching its Fiesta vehicle in the United States. For example, social media played an integral role in the success of Small Business Saturday, the US shopping promotion created by American Express for the weekend immediately following Thanksgiving (for American Express CMO John Hayess perspective on that launch, see How we see it: Three senior executives on the future of marketing, on mckinseyquarterly.com). In addition, when consumers are ready to buy, companies can promote timesensitive targeted deals and offers through social media to generate traffic and sales. Online menswear company Bonobos, for example, provided an incentive for its Twitter followers by unlocking a discount code after its messages were resent a certain number of times. As a result of this effort, almost 100 consumers bought products from the site for the first time. The campaign delivered a 1,200 percent return on investment in just 24 hours. Finally, social media can solicit consumer input after the purchase. This ability to gain productdevelopment insights from customers in a relatively inexpensive way is emerging as one of social medias most significant advantages. Intuit, for example, has its community forums. Starbucks uses MyStarbucksIdea.com to collect its customers views about improving the companys products and services and then aggregates submitted ideas and prominently displays them on a dedicated Web site. That site groups ideas by product, experience, and involvement; ranks user participation; and shows ideas actively under consideration by the company and those that have been implemented.

Converting knowledge to action

Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they

want to increase that share to 5 percent. One problem is that a lot of senior executives know little about social media. But the main obstacle is the perception that the return on investment (ROI) from such initiatives is uncertain. Without a clear sense of the value social media creates, its perhaps not surprising that so many CEOs and other senior executives dont feel comfortable when their companies go beyond mere experiments with social-media strategy. Yet we can measure the impact of social media well beyond straight volume and consumer-sentiment metrics; in fact, we can precisely determine the buzz surrounding a product or brand and then calculate how social media drives purchasing behavior. To do soand then ensure that social media complements broader marketing strategiescompanies must obviously coordinate data, tools, technology, and talent across multiple functions. In many cases, senior business leaders must open up their agendas and recognize the importance of supporting and even undertaking initiatives that may traditionally have been left to the chief marketing officer. As our colleagues noted last year, were all marketers now.6 Consider the experience of a telecommunications company that proactively adopted social media but had no idea if its efforts were working. The company had launched Twitter-based customer service capabilities, several promotional campaigns built around social contests, a fan page with discounts and tech tips, and an active response program to engage with people speaking about the brand. In socialmedia terms, the investment was relatively large, and the companys senior executives wanted more than anecdotal evidence that the strategy was paying off. As a starting point, to ensure that the company was doing a quality job designing and executing its social presence, it benchmarked its efforts against approaches used by other companies known to be successful in social media. It then advanced the following hypotheses: If all of these social-media activities improve general service perceptions about the brand, that improvement should be reflected in a higher volume of positive online posts. 7 If social sharing is effective, added clicks and traffic should result in higher search placements. If both of these assumptions hold true, social-media activity should help drive salesideally, at a rate even higher than the company could achieve with its average gross rating point (GRP) of advertising expenditures.8 The company then tested its options. At various times, it spent less money on conventional advertising, especially as social-media activity ramped up, and it modeled the rising positive sentiment and higher search positions just as it would using traditional metrics. The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did. Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off. Whats more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media. In other cases, social media may have a more specific role, such as helping to launch a new product or to mitigate negative word of mouth. Similar types of analyses can focus on mixing the impact of buzz, search, and traffic; correlating that with sales or renewals (or whatever the key metric may be); and then gauging the result against total costs. This approach can give executives the confidence and focus they need to invest more money, time, and resources in social media. As these social-media activities gain scale, the challenges center less around justifying funding and more around organizational issues such as developing the right processes and governance structure, identifying clear rolesfor all involved in social-media strategy, from marketing to customer service to product developmentand bolstering the talent base, and improving performance standards. New capabilities abound, and social-media best practices are barely starting to emerge. We do know this: because social-

media influences every element of the consumer decision journey, communication must take place between as well as within functions. That complicates lines of reporting and decision-making authority. If insights from monitoring social media are relevant to nonmarketing functions such as product development, for instance, how will you identify and disseminate that information efficiently and effectivelyand then ensure that it gets used? If you spot an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with a key influencer, how will you quickly engage the right senior executive to follow through? If you recognize a fast-moving service concern, how will you respond rapidly and openlyand when should you do so outside the traditional service organization? Senior executives across the company must recognize and begin to answer such questions. Social media is extending the disruptive impact of the digital era across a broad range of functions. Meanwhile, the perceived lack of metrics, the fear, and the limited sense of whats possible are eroding. Executives can identify the functions, touch points, and goals of social-media activities, as well as craft approaches to measure their impact and manage their risks. The time is ripe for executive-suite discussions on how to lead and to learn from people within your company, marketers outside it, and, most of all, your customers.

Article 2

Measuring marketings worth

You cant spend wisely unless you understand marketings full impact. Here are five questions executives should ask to help maximize the bang for their bucks.
MAY 2012 David Court, Jonathan Gordon, and Jesko Perrey Source: Marketing & Sales Practice

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Its 8 AM, and the chief marketing officer is wading through his inbox. A board member has e-mailed him about an opportunity to invest in an emerging digital platform. It looks cool, but its speculative and not cheap. Minutes later, the chief financial officer appears in the doorway: The boss wants to sign a big sponsorship deal. Can we drop out of TV for a couple of months to pay for it? The CMO has barely started to explain what happened the last time the company went dark on TVan aggressive rival grabbed market sharewhen his assistant interrupts. The CEO is calling. Whats going on with our brand image? she

asks. The latest monitor report looks bad. The CMO promises a full debriefing later in the day, but hes not looking forward to the conversation. Brand scores are down, and the reasons are tough to manage: factors such as bad experiences with intermediary retailers and mediocre word of mouth. The number and strength of such competing pressures has been growing. Seven years ago, when digital advertising was still in its infancy and long before social media had become a marketing force, we described in a McKinsey Quarterly article how many traditional mass-marketing advertising models were under attack and suggested some approaches to make marketing investments count in an increasingly complex environment.1 Since then, we have been fortunate enough to see more than 200 organizations tackle the difficult issue of how to improve marketings return on investment (ROI). Over that period, as new kinds of media have grown in importance and mobile communications have created new opportunities to reach consumers, the ROI challenge has become more intense. In the face of growing complexity, relentless financial pressure, and a still-challenging economic environment, marketers are striving to exploit new-media vehicles and to measure their impact through new analytic approaches and tools. Most are making progress. Yet we are consistently struck by the power of asking five seemingly basic questions. These questions, detailed in this article, cut to the heart of the quest to drive returns on marketing spending. Coming to grips with them, and gaining alignment across the C-suite, is critical for making real progress rather than becoming bogged down by excessive firefighting and ultimately futile debates about the precision and certainty of measurement.

1. What exactly influences our consumers today?

The digital revolution and the explosion of social media have profoundly changed what influences consumers as they undertake their purchasing decision journey.2 When considering products, they read online reviews and compare prices. Once in stores, they search for deals with mobile devices and drive hard bargains. And after the purchase, they become reviewers themselves and demand ongoing relationships with products and brands. Although companies have access to terabytes of data about these behavioral changes, many still cant answer the fundamental question: how exactly are our customers influenced? One global consumer products company, for example, had for years relied heavily on traditional marketing, such as television and print ads. Concerned about the growth of new media, the company decided to research just what was influencing the choices of consumersand found that only 30 percent of them cited traditional advertising. In fact, in-store interactions with consumers were more important in communicating the companys message and driving potential buyers to consider its products. Yet salespeople, once critical to actually closing deals, had declined in importance because consumers regarded Internet reviews as more objective. In addition, these trends were not universal. While the influence of advertising had declined for existing products, the impact of TV remained strong for some new products, especially in emerging markets. Armed with insights such as these, the company was able to construct a marketing allocation model that factored in both the consumer importance and costeffectiveness of different points of interaction. This enabled much sharper decisions about its marketing mix, both by geography and in relation to specific product situations. Time and time again, we find that companies are aware of the growing importance of touch points such as earned media but dont understand the true magnitude of their effects or how to influence them. The solution is usually to commission research that gets at the heart of understanding the consumers decision journey. Such foundational work must shine a light on the touch points and messages that actually influence consumer behavior. Marketers must be ready to use the findings to debunk accepted wisdom and legacy rules of thumb. In todays fragmented media world, only by knowing how the way consumers

interact with your company has evolved can you begin to make more cost-effective marketing investments that truly influence purchase decisions.3

2. How well informed (really) is our marketing judgment?

Marketing has always combined facts and judgment: after all, theres no analytic approach that can singlehandedly tell you when you have a great piece of creative work. A decade ago, when traditional advertising was all that mattered, most senior marketers justifiably had great confidence in their judgment on spending and messaging. Today, many privately confess to being less certain. Thats hardly surprising: marketers have been perfecting the TV playbook for decades, while some of the newest marketing platforms have been around for months or even weeks. But it can be tough to admit publicly that your judgment is incomplete or out-of-date. And given the money required, its hard both to make a rational investment case for additional marketing spending andin the same breathto admit that you are really making a passionate guess. Marketers often hear that the answer to improving their judgment in this rapidly changing environment is data, and some companies have sophisticated analytical tools. Yet its difficult to integrate all of this information in a way that not only provides answers that you trust but can also inform smart marketing changes. We counsel a return to what creates great marketing judgment: start by formulating hypotheses about the impact of changes to your marketing mix and then seek analytical evidence. One insurance company, for example, spent a year working on a complex demand model to try to understand the impact of its growing marketing spending in light of declining sales. Yet output from the model felt wrong, and the analytics were too complicated for business leaders to understand. It was only when the company articulated specific questions it was trying to answer, and designed targeted modeling exercises to prove or disprove them, that it was able to eliminate a lot of noise in the data and uncover a clear relationship between marketing spending and business results. Thats when the internal dialogue shifted from should we be spending on marketing at all? to whats the optimum marketing spending needed to hit our targets? We are excited by the possibilities that big data and advanced analytics createno question. But data remain only as useful as the expertise you bring to bear, and good judgment will remain a hallmark of the best marketers.

3. How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans?

Successful communication requires hitting the right audience with the right message at the right time: a small, moving target. With traditional media, marketers have mitigated the risk of failure through years of trial and error about what makes great advertising. Thats not the case with todays new media. Influence can shift rapidly, and there is little accumulated experience about which messages work, when marketers should apply them, how they can be scaled, or even whom they influence. Looking to external agencies is little help; theyre in the same boat. At a basic level, the degree of ROI riskgetting the sales results you want from a given amount of marketing spendinghas increased. Yet while spending on new media is a risky bet, its a bet companies feel compelled to make. So the question becomes how much risk is too muchor, for that matter, too little. Weve seen efforts that result in short-term sales dips: a retailer moving too quickly away from circulars and a consumer-goods player reducing TV spending too fast. Weve also seen companies feel the heat from investors for rapidly ramping up spending on digital channels without cutting it elsewhere. The global consumer products company we mentioned earlier offers an alternative approach. While its customer research suggested that significant changes were required in the way it allocated marketing spending, executives didnt want to choose an excessively risky path. They therefore set risk parameters

that enabled some changes in the marketing mix but limited the total shift in any given year. There was a maximum percentage for spending on unproven vehicles, for example, as well as limits on annual spending reductions in some channels or increases in others. This simple allocation model ensured a gradual move to emerging media, mitigating risk while providing breathing room for piloting, testing, and learning. That approach also can help with scenario planning: one media provider developed a straightforward decision support tool for precisely that purpose. Geared to brand managers, not postdoctoral researchers, the tool used simple response curves that allowed the marketer to simulate different scenarios of marketing spending. The tool was embedded in an easily used PowerPoint slide and proved invaluable for settling on marketing approaches that hit the sweet spot for a number of variables, from cost to effectiveness to risk. Such decision tools do more than provide marketers with valuable information. They stimulate dialogue about real trade-offs and help to manage expectations across business units and functions whose cooperation is often critical when companies change the broader commercial mix. Managing risk is critical, and marketers shouldnt be shy about putting this issue squarely on the table. With thoughtful scenario planning and cross-functional participation, such discussions can be extremely rich and rewarding.

4. How are we coping with added complexity in the marketing organization?

As the external marketing environment becomes more complex, so must the internal environment. Marketers historically had only a handful of communication vehicles; now they have dozens of them, and the number is growing rapidly. This proliferation has led to the emergence of both external and internal specialists, with accumulated experience not only in media channels (such as social media) but even in individual vehicles (such as Facebook). The exponential growth in marketing complexity seems unending and needs to be managed. Weve found three things that are always true in managing complexity within the marketing organization. First, youll require a number of specialists. You just will. You cant get the skills and knowledge you need in just one person, and youre not likely to get everything you need internally. Second, youll need somebody who both integrates marketing efforts across channels and communications vehicles and focuses on the bottom line. In packaged-goods companies, this wasand may still bethe role of brand managers, but the basic requirement is that it must be done bysomeone. Finally, youll need absolute clarity in processes, roles, and responsibilities not only within the marketing organization but also throughout your company (across functions and business units) and externally (with agencies and external vendors). The trust-based relationship between companies and agencies isnt at risk, but everyone will have to accept that roles are changing. (For more on organizational moves companies should make in a world of more pervasive marketing, see Five no regrets moves for superior customer engagement, forthcoming on mckinseyquarterly.com.) Addressing complexity in a comprehensive way requires a dedicated effort. Senior executives at one North American consumer-packaged-goods company, for example, tried to sketch out their own future of marketing with an eye to how they would need to work differently over the coming five years, given the companys growth priorities. No one pretended to have a crystal ball, but examining the implications of several generally accepted trends in consumer behavior and media consumption habits made some bold forecasting possible. The company then debated the future of brand managers and specialist centers of excellence and what that future implied for resources required centrally and in business units. Finally, it asked what should be stopped or dramatically deprioritized. By undertaking this exercise, the consumerpackaged-goods company saw how it could keep its marketing headcount and budget relatively flat, while

massively shifting senior leaderships role, the culture of marketing, and the capabilities of specialist and generalist resources.

5. What metrics should we track given our (imperfect) options?

In an ideal world, the financial returns and the ability of all forms of communication to influence consumers would be precisely calculated, and deciding the marketing mix would be simple. In reality, there are multiple, and usually imperfect, ways to measure most established forms of marketing. Nothing approaches a definitive metric for social media and other emerging communication channels, and no single metric can evaluate the effectiveness of all spending. Yet you must have a way to track progress and hold marketers accountable. Thats nonnegotiable. How do you do it? Even in the absence of a single way of measuring ROI for different channels, marketers should move toward an apples-to-apples way of comparing returns across a range of media. One international logistics company, for example, faced this necessity after committing more than $200 million to rebrand itself following a series of acquisitions. Senior executives wanted proof that the effort was workingand in a form they could readily understand, not marketing jargon. So the company adopted a simple three-step approach: measuring the impact of advertising on consumer recall, on the publics perceptions of the business, and on sales leads and revenue. With these data in handand proof that the rebranding effort was ultimately improving performancemembers of the Csuite had the assurance they needed to reaffirm the investment and to commit themselves to more complex measurements, such as marketing-mix modeling. Because the metrics were developed internally, members of the companys board were similarly reassured. Likewise, one consumer-packaged-goods company uses econometric analysis and frequent brand tracking to assemble a scorecard of returns in the short term (average and marginal marketing ROIs within 12 months) and the longer term (progress on brand equity and brand loyalty for periods of more than 12 months). The company is tantalizingly close to its ultimate goal of truly being able to make decisions about short- versus long-term trade-offs and to deliver complete answers to show me the money requests. Metrics are rarely perfect. Yet the volume of data available today should make it possible to find metrics and analytic opportunities that take advantage of your unique insights, are understood and trusted by your top team, provide proof of progress, and lay a foundation for more sophisticated approaches to tracking marketing ROI in the future. The marketing environment continues to change rapidly and often feels like a moving target thats impossible to hit. Its genuinely difficult to overemphasize the magnitude of the change or the challenge. Yet time and time again, we find that marketers who have good answers to the five basic questions are better equipped to do battle for the effectiveness of marketing and to win the war for growth.