fournaiseThe Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the world’s leading Marketing Performance Measurement & Management (MPM) companies, revealed in its latest study, that 76% of marketers track effectiveness wrongly, besides some other interesting findings. Fact is that it is astonishing that in today’s age of business performance such a high percentage of marketers still use the wrong Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track and prove the effectiveness and ROI of their marketing strategies and campaigns.


“When are marketers finally going to realize that their job is to generate incremental (measurable and P&L-quantifiable) customer demand for their organization’s products and services, and when are they going to start tracking their marketing effectiveness accordingly?” Jerome Fontaine, Global CEO & Marketing Performance Chief of Fournaise asked, concluding “If marketers want to be taken seriously and have a bigger, stronger presence in the boardroom, they need to stop living in their la-la-land and start behaving like real business people.”

To identify what works, what does not, where, when and why, Fournaise measured again – as every year - the actual effectiveness of 2.5+ million B2C/B2B marketing strategies, campaigns and ads across all media channels (traditional, digital, direct, and mobile) across more than 20 countries. The insights gained from the study predestines Fournaise to be the perfect marketing advisor on what corrective actions should be taken to push strategies, campaigns and ads to deliver better results, performance and ROI.

Further, Fournaise this time analyzed more than 500 marketing strategy documents, campaign briefs and effectiveness reports that have been created and/or provided by/to marketers, identifying four shocking facts:

For 77% of marketers, effectiveness is still mainly about awareness

77% of marketers consider generating gradual awareness a critical way to prove the effectiveness of their marketing. By positioning awareness as one of their top KPIs on their ‘Marketing Performance Dashboard”, these Marketers assume that if their target audience sees their campaigns/ads, the audience will automatically engage with them. However, in the world of marketing effectiveness, using awareness as a top effectiveness KPI is wrong, as awareness in itself is nothing, if not specifically built to generate (measurable) interest, desire and ultimately action (AIDA) that have a direct positive impact on the company’s top line (revenue, gross profit) and/or bottom line (EBIT, EBITDA, net profit).

74% of marketers don’t pay enough attention to their CVPs

With awareness as one of their top KPIs, 74% of marketers believe it is all about standing out through creativity, media placement and anything digital. Consequently, that is reflected in the briefs they provide to their agencies. For these marketers, form and style are more important than the content/message – they focus too much on “how” the message is to be delivered and not enough on “what” message should be delivered. This often makes them neglect or wrongly prioritize their brand Customer Value Propositions (CVPs) and product CVPs. The consequences here are that the CVPs they deploy are often weak, unattractive and/or don’t do justice to the very products they are supposed to generate customer demand for. In the world of marketing effectiveness this is wrong, as interest, desire and action can only be achieved by deploying first of all solid, audience-attractive and audience-relevant CVPs, and then optimized CVP architectures.

For 71% of marketers, effectiveness is just about engagement

After awareness, 71% of Marketers believe that the next best way to prove effectiveness is to demonstrate their strategies, campaigns and ads engaged their target audience. Their ‘Marketing Performance Dashboards’ are therefore full of engagement KPIs, including website traffic, views, calls, clicks, open rates, likes or tweets. Again, in the world of marketing effectiveness, effectiveness can’t just be about engagement, since engagement is nothing without conversion – and by conversion, Fournaise means e.g. more sales, more orders, more market share or more qualified prospects.

Marketers mistake engagement for conversion

Interestingly, 86% of these “engagement” marketers (voluntarily, genuinely or conveniently) mistake engagement for conversion, which is something Fournaise believes may be the most alarming fact of all. Actually, these marketers believe that their engagement KPIs prove they generated more business for their organization, even though they can’t really (and unequivocally) link these engagement KPIs to actual business and P&L-related results and marketing ROI (based on the real and precise finance-driven definition of Marketing ROI and not the fluffy ones they often come up with).

By MediaBUZZ