LONDON – 90% of Marketers are not trained in Marketing Performance & Marketing ROI, and 80% struggle with being able to properly demonstrate to their Top Management the business effectiveness of their Marketing spending, campaigns and activities.
“It’s an education problem, at two levels”
These are two of the eyebrow-raising findings identified by The Fournaise Marketing Group – one of the world’s leading All-Media Marketing Performance Measurement & Management (MPM) companies – through its Global Marketing Effectiveness Program in which it measures the performance of Marketers each year, via (1) hi-quant interviews with more than 1,200 CEOs, Management & Marketing decision-makers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia; and (2) the actual effectiveness of 2.5+ million B2C/B2B marketing strategies, campaigns and ads Fournaise Performance-Tracks across all media channels (traditional, digital, direct, mobile) across 20+ countries worldwide each year.
At a time when CEOs are putting even more pressure on Marketers to generate (and prove they generate) incremental customer demand for the companies’ products/services (i.e. their ability to generate more sales, more market share, more prospects and/or more conversions), Fournaise tracked four head-shaking results:
1) 67% of Marketers don’t believe Marketing ROI requires a financial outcome (these are the very Marketers who struggle to give the correct mathematical formula for Marketing ROI), demonstrating a total lack of understanding of what ROI is all about.
2) 64% of Marketers use Brand Awareness as their Top Marketing ROI KPI, 58% place “Likes”, “Tweets”, “Clicks” and/or “CTR” in their Top 5 Marketing ROI KPIs, and 31% still believe simply measuring the audience they have reached is Marketing ROI.
3) 63% of Marketers don’t include any financial outcome when reporting on and presenting Marketing results to their CEOs & Top Management.
4) More than 80% are unable to write a P&L and Balance Sheet correctly when given a simple business scenario. These Marketers are unable to give the correct definitions of basic Financial KPIs used day in day out by CEOs and Boards (such as EBITDA, P/E Ratio or ROE), and are unable to correctly explain the impact Marketing can have on a company’s Balance Sheet – demonstrating an inability to understand and speak the Finance & Accounting language.
“It’s an education problem, at two levels:
(1) We analysed the content of hundreds of Marketing degrees/diplomas around the world and noticed that 90% do not have any specific (and proper) training on Marketing Performance & Marketing ROI – so we can’t be surprised if Marketers with a Marketing degree/diploma struggle with Marketing Performance & ROI; and
(2) We tracked that 85% of Marketers are well educated, but unfortunately more than 50% have degrees/diplomas in a non-Marketing-related field such as English, History, Economics, Journalism, Sociology and Foreign Languages – these Marketers do not know enough and do not master enough the critical Marketing techniques and formulae (79% of these Marketers struggle to correctly state what the basic 4Ps & 5Cs of Marketing are – in the right order), and are lost when it comes to Marketing Performance & ROI” said Jerome Fontaine, Global CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.
“In other words, every Tom, Dick & Harry is a Marketer, lacking the scientific and financial knowledge necessary to inform and optimise the creative side of Marketing. CEOs have told us again and again: they want ROI Marketers®, i.e. 360-degree performance machines trained to deliver (real) business results and prove/optimise ROI. As long as Marketers continue to fail to get trained in, master the use of and optimise Marketing Performance & Marketing ROI, they will struggle to demonstrate to CEOs that they are not ‘money spenders who jump on (and hide) behind the latest fads and blow smoke’, but real business generators” Fontaine added.
