Monday, December 18, 2006

So what's going on here then?

As i already alluded to in the title of this blog, the purpose of what I'm trying to do here is the creation of a resource for people who have to analyse marketing. I want to gather information on best practice, top software to help with the task and interesting ways of analysing problems.

As a bit of background, my experience in marketing analytics started during my time at the UK media agency PHD (formerly New PHD) where i was employed at their Brand Science subsidiary. I spent just over two years at PHD where i learnt a great deal about the UK media industry and what clients were looking for from their marketing. I was fortunate to get the opportunity to move to Accenture along with two of my colleagues in 2002 to help Jeff Merrihue form the Marketing Sciences team. I have recently left Accenture to start my own business called Marketing QED and it is this venture which has prompted me to start this blog - more on this in future posts.

Anyway a couple of final points - what do i mean by Marketing Analysis?

For me, almost all marketing activities serve one common purpose - to sell stuff to people. Some debate whether "brand building" activities fit into this framework or indeed if they should be analysed in detail...but it's not a debate which lasts for long when the cheque book comes out. For me, marketing needs to be selling something - that may be toothpaste, a dream holiday or a political idea. When if comes down to it though, if we are to learn lessons from marketing, we need to analyse it. In doing this, we should address three key questions:

  • What was the objective of the activity
  • How will it will work? Is there a model?
  • What actually happened - i.e. is there any data?

By addressing these points, powerful lessons can be learned and applied to future activities.

I urge anyone who doesn't believe that marketing in the past has much to tell us about the future to read Ogilvy on Advertising.