Monthly Archives: April 2011

Marketing ROI can be one of those arbitrary phrases that sometimes has no real meaning. It is kind of like trying to put a finger on what corporate culture means. How does one define it? Measure it?

Does the term only exist so that us marketers could prove our existence… our worth to the rest of the organization? Or does it even matter what the organization feels about marketing; since every other organization in the world seems to have some sort of marketing department? And so, often I would find marketing would mean creating flyers. Or worse, doing support tasks for sales teams.

Due to scenarios such as these, Marketing ROI quickly became the de facto standard for proving the value and worth of certain marketing activities. It became a quantifiable way to prove that what we did as marketers – mattered.

The problem however was that no one really knew what exact numbers and metrics to look at! What’s lacking, even to this day, is a good understanding of what metrics work for a business and what don’t.

Having been in B2B marketing for many years, I have come to understand that some activities can be tangibly measured and some cannot. I also believe that some things do not need to be measured at all.

Einstein knew what he was talking about when he said “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”