I got some great feedback on my last blog post, “Why Advertising is Irrelevant.” It has spurred some great discussions with people I admire and who’s opinion I respect. I have to admit I wanted to be provocative because of the tired old approach of blanketing the earth with ad copy to get my attention, or worse, reading about work that puts gold statues on agency shelves but doesn’t help the client.

That said, I think I need to decamp for a moment. Everything in the marketing mix has it’s time and place. A TV ad still is probably the best choice for quickly gaining general awareness for some consumer audiences. My point is that we’ve got to start thinking differently.

Our goals as marketers should be to come up with great creative work, but it needs to be more driven by consumer input than ever before….and I don’t mean the kind of input that chooses the ending of Hollywood movies. I am talking using a measurement-driven marketing model to make the appropriate choices at the appropriate times by using input gathered from your customers.

This is easy to write about in a blog, but much more difficult to implement. This is hard stuff for most companies. Even most consultants who are talking about measurement-driven marketing, only get a piece of the puzzle (the left brain or the right) but can’t put the entire picture together in their own consulting company, let alone with the clients. You know as well as I do that internal silos, management structures and lack of clear directives are keeping measurement practices from gaining ground in most companies.

We’ve been thinking a lot about this problem and have been developing some alliances around this involving management consultant, analytics tools and design and development practices that are helping companies gain customer insight through metrics to improve marketing effectiveness. To steal a phrase from Mike Ackmann, one of our favorite consultants, the goal is “Data, not Drama.”

To meet this goal, we’ve crafted a different approach:

1) Strategy Integration
Develop integrated strategies involving key stakeholders across all disciplines in the company. Involving Marketing, Operations, HR, Finance, Technology and Sales.

2) Profitability Practice
Develop processes and practices to integrate customer interaction data into actionable business intelligence across the organization. We translate what is happening out there in the marketplace to what it means for your business.

3) Practical Application
Start simple. Measure what you can today and begin to develop a measurement/profitability practice within your organization. This applies to technology we choose as well. We look for the simplest, most cost-effective tools and technology to get the job done. Learn more about getting started ……