Don’t fear MPM

MPM. No it’s not a new version of a popular candy. It’s Marketing Performance Measurement, words that can strike fear in the hearts of marketing executives, or words that can free up resources, budgets and shift the conversation of marketing as an expense to one of an investment.

This was one of the key takeaways that Eric Kintz, VP – Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence at Hewlett-Packard, had after participating on a CMO panel at the IDC Marketing Performance Measurement Conference , in New York this week. Here are Eric’s top-line thoughts post-conference, posted on his Marketing Excellence blog.

1. Marketers are implementing MPM out of fear. However, Eric says that MPM is a actually a “lever for the marketing organizations to shift the conversation from marketing as a cost to marketing as an investment.”

2. There is still a major disconnect between marketing and finance.  Eric says that traditional financial systems do not allow marketing to track spend by marketing campaign, “thereby undermining marketing’s ability to have a ROI discussion.”

3.  Progress is being made on linking marketing and sales across the industry. Eric says that this will “greatly help tie the contribution of Marketing to improving the pipeline and accelerating sales results.”

4. MPM in the tech industry could greatly benefit from consumer goods MPM. Eric says that marketing mix modeling techniques used in consumer goods industry are only emerging now in the tech industry, something it needs to embrace to drive future marketing investment trade-offs.

5. Finally, MPM is still not fully embedded into marketing processes, such as marketing planning, but can be through employing Lean Six Sigma techniques to “drive more discipline into their marketing processes and embed measures in the very core of these processes.”