Saturday, March 28, 2015

The Marketing Assessment: Measuring Business Performance

Measuring progress on the consistent implementation of marketing and communication strategies is important to the life of any organization or business. Many make the mistake of allowing sales and/or revenue streams to crest and trough, coinciding with changing market forces. Allowing your revue streams to gradually ebb as a result of inactivity or inattentiveness can harm your business dramatically. It can create a scenario where you are ill prepared to take on unforeseen sudden changes in the marketplace, or it can make you unable to effectively fund growth and marketing opportunities properly during a trough in sales.

Most companies or organizations (note I am making a distinction between not for profit “organizations” and for profit “businesses”) take a hap hazard approach to marketing.  They often utilize, what I call the “shinny object” syndrome by marketing based on, whatever initiative catches their attention and falls within generally accepted marketing principles. They tend to support sponsorships, traditional media, inconsistent online strategies, direct mail, events and on occasion some limited public relations.  The problem with all this is, it is generally not well co-ordinated, defined and consistently applied. No one has actually crafted a marketing message that responds to current audience needs and demands; and the results are usually viewed on an individual project-by-project basis with little means of evaluating performance as a group or over time.

The problem is compounded by the fact that most managers, directors, owners, presidents and CEOs all believe they know more than just a little about marketing.  They know their product or service inside out and they understand their business proposition, so they feel qualified to be able to make marketing decisions for their organization or business. In turn, these decision makers empower middle managers, graphic artists, social network specialists and web programmers, often without supporting customer data and product analysis, to institute marketing initiatives.

While all these and many other marketing, advertising, sales and public relations functions can contribute to a marketing program. They can only be successful when implemented under a carefully thought out marketing strategy that has incorporated the tools and means of evaluating performance. That strategy overlays the products and services, features and benefits, customer service strategy, unique selling features and nature of an organization over customer demographics to establish goals and objectives that can be measured or modified as the performance dictates.

The reason that companies and organizations do not enter into such a process readily, is that - more than cost, the process demands the attention of the senior management team. It demands that they participate in a very focused process; evaluating their performance in detail. In a senior decision maker’s world, this is their most valuable resource, time and effort. Diverting management’s attention to conduct a marketing review and put in place a process for evaluating the organization’s performance doesn't seem to measure up to more perceived important company issues, such as new products, ongoing products and services, sales, customer service, etc.


There are marketing strategies that can be employed to help protect companies from troughs in the business cycle or to help grow your organization to the next level. How you answer the questions in our marketing survey will help you understand how prepared your company or organization is.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Learning From Failure

One of the most underrated strategies for changing the prospects on a product, company, organization or process, is learning from failure and applying what you have learned. Most organizations, and of course the people in them, believe that failure is bad. They also believe that learning from it is pretty straightforward: Ask people to reflect on what they did wrong, perhaps write a report about it and encourage them to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Failure is not always bad. In organizations and companies sometimes failure can be bad, but sometimes it’s inevitable, and sometimes even good. Second, learning from organizational failures is anything but straightforward since most lessons are superficial and they allow us to cling to existing ideas of success.
Failure and fault are virtually inseparable in most organizations. We all learn early that admitting failure means taking the blame. That is why so few organizations reward learning from failure. Failure can come from many sources ranging from inattention, willfully violating a process, lack of ability and process complexity, to uncertainty and exploratory testing. As we go through this range we begin to see that some of these may make it difficult to identify the exact nature of the failure. A sophisticated understanding of failure’s causes and contexts will help institute an effective strategy for learning from failure. Although an infinite number of things can go wrong in organizations, mistakes fall into three broad categories: preventable, complexity-related and intelligent.
Preventable failures in predictable operations: Most failures in this category can indeed be considered “bad.” They usually involve deviations from spec in the closely defined processes of high-volume or routine operations in manufacturing and services. With proper training and support, employees can follow those processes consistently.
Unavoidable failures in complex systems: A large number of organizational failures are due to the inherent uncertainty of work. Although serious failures can be averted by following best practices small process failures are inevitable. To consider them bad is not just a misunderstanding of how complex systems work; it is counterproductive. Avoiding consequential failures means rapidly identifying and correcting small failures.
Intelligent failures at the frontier: Failures in this category can rightly be considered “good,” because they provide valuable new knowledge that can help an organization leap ahead of the competition and ensure its future growth. But failure is still inherently emotionally charged; getting an organization to accept it takes leadership. Insist that your organization develop a clear understanding of what happened, not of “who did it, when things go wrong.
Here are some tips to consistently help learn from failures:
  • Frame the work accurately
  • Embrace messengers
  • Acknowledge limits, invite participation
  • Set boundaries and hold people accountable.