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Les Binet and Peter Field
IPA dataMINE, World Advertising Research Center (WARC) 2007;
Paperback; £75 (+p&p)/£60 (IPA members)
ISBN 978-1-8411-6198-3
The title of this report reflects the fact that the accountability and effectiveness of marketing is under the spotlight. In the USA two highly influential bodies, the Association of National Advertisers and the Marketing Science Institute have identified this as a priority issue; the Journal of Marketing devoted an issue to this theme in late 2004.
In the UK, Sir Roy Gardner when CEO of Centrica commented that: 'Marketers must be more than functional specialists to win over chief executives'. However, it seems to me in my role as a Director of the Cranfield University Return on Marketing Best Practice Research Club, that while there is a lot of debate about the issues, and many academic-level papers on this topic, real practical guidance to help marketers identify the strategies that they should pursue to demonstrate the contribution that marketing makes in achieving the business objectives of organisations seems much more limited.
This is why Binet and Field's report represents such a major breakthrough. The concept behind the report is brilliant -- analyse in detail the database of entries to the IPA Effectiveness Awards over the past nine years or so and identify what has successfully demonstrated that an entry has contributed towards increasing the profitability of the organisation concerned.
As the authors state under their Aims: 'This publication is about the pursuit of profitability, not the winning of prizes. It aims chiefly to narrow the gap between common practice and best practice in marketing, by identifying key drivers of effective marketing -- effective in terms of maximising payback'. This is echoed in the sub-title of the report, 'Identifying the marketing practices and metrics that truly increase profitability'. Being the IPA awards, the emphasis is on marketing communications, but the nature of an entry means that the analysis is able to cover a wider range of success factors that 'shed useful light on the broader aspects of marketing effectiveness'. In addition, the emphasis in the awards has over the years increasingly moved to entrants having to demonstrate the business results achieved.
While the Awards have been in place since 1980, a richer seam of data is...