Marketing: don’t spend - invest

Boosting returns on marketing investment
I could not have said it better myself

Today's chief marketing officers (CMOs) confront a painful reality: their traditional marketing model is being challenged, and they can foresee a day when it will no longer work.
The declining effectiveness of mass advertising is only the most visible sign of distress. Marketers also face a general proliferation of media and distribution channels, 1 declining trust in advertising, multitasking by consumers, and digital technologies that give users more control over their media time. 2 These trends are simultaneously fragmenting both audiences and the channels needed to reach them. The danger for marketers is that change will render the time-honored way of getting messages to consumers through TV commercials less effective at best and a waste of time and money at worst.

Among marketers, there's much frustration and little agreement about what to do next. Some are reaching for marketing-mix models that use sophisticated econometric methods to tease out the different effects of the marketing mix on business results. But the historical data that fuel such techniques may prove an unreliable guide to future returns.
Marketers need a more rigorous approach to a fragmenting world?one that jettisons mentalities and behavior from advertising's golden age and treats marketing not as "spend" but as the investment it really is. In other words, it will be necessary to boost marketing's return on investment (ROI). By adhering to the same investment principles that other functions follow, a CMO can improve the alignment between marketing and financial objectives, capitalize on a brand's most distinctive elements with greater success, more precisely target the consumers and media vehicles yielding the largest and fastest payoff, manage risk more carefully, and track returns more closely. In short, only by thoughtfully and systematically applying investment fundamentals to marketing can CMOs respond to the complex challenges they face.

Mixed into this is how do you engage your audience - market - stakeholders.

How do you leverage your brand core competencies?

How do you combine: Connectivity, Culture, Community & Commerce in more meaningful ways?

This means deploying strategies like Glen Urban's trust based strategies, or creative content strategies that leverage experience, co-creation, or initiatives that support consumers in new and innovative ways, rather than offering up interruptive marketing communications.
Also its tough, because we need to do 2 things change our mental models about marketing and understand better the end-user.

Glen Urban says the challenge is how do you make your customers successful? Advocate for them and they will advocate for you. Its a combination of the hard financial stuff and offering up solutions for customers that apppeal to them. That they want to pull on, share and participate in - that they value.
Remember its hearts and minds that win wars!

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