Mats Rönne is a partner of Penetrace. He is a senior marketing advisor with a career in international brand development and marketing communications. He has held a variety of senior roles and positions for both B2B and B2C companies and has had global responsibility for brands like Electrolux, Ericsson and Skanska.

EffectivenessWeek (or EffWeek for short) in the UK is an impressive collaborative gathering of marketing effectiveness experts. It is supported by all major industry associations and includes some very interesting learnings, so for me it was one of the most rewarding events I have been to in a long time. A lot of the conference material can also be found on EffWorks.

This year the focal point was a report called Culture first on how companies work with marketing effectiveness in their respective organisations. The report listed 5 key areas that need to be in place for marketing effectiveness to get attention in the organization:

1. Collaboration sits at the core. Marketing and finance (and sales and business development and …) need to work together to develop the framework.

2. Language is possibly the most critical component. Marketers and communicators must become better at communicating what marketing does and delivers, without resorting to branding jargon. Some examples cited of language that would resonate better with a CFO/CEO were to talk about “value and margin protection” rather than “brand halo effects” or “long-term focus”, or to say “levers to unlock future growth” rather than “brand metrics”.

3. Process means that marketing effectiveness must be part of the marketing strategy and communication plans from the start, not something you think about after the activity is done.

4. Tools in the form of measurement systems, relevant metrics and presentation tools. A good recommendation in the report was to separate the effectiveness metrics into three areas.

  a) Financial metrics such as sales, margin, market share, sales per customer etc.

  b) Brand metrics such as awareness, preference, salience, positioning associations etc.

  c) Customer metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), customer satisfaction, churn, conversion cost etc.

5. Capability. This is an area that is lacking, and both advertisers and agencies need to work diligently to train people with the relevant experience that can deliver the needed insights.