Return on Ideas

There’s a significant disconnect in our industry between marketers and management. The marketing department is often criticised for taking a tactical approach to building sales without putting in place proper measures to ensure value and accountability. Management in turn is seen as too cost focused and criticised for taking too short-term a view of the role of marketing.

In a new report from the DMA, CIMA and the CIM, its author, Prof. Robert Shaw, goes some considerable way to improving relations between those who hold the purse strings and those tasked with marketing the business. ‘Return on Ideas’ is a bold attempt to “put the finance-marketing dialogue back on the rails”. It has developed the ‘Infinity model’ borne out of a study marketing best-practices from over 100 businesses.

The report finds that: “the best organisations have a positive creative tension between financial rigour and the marketing imagination”. It goes into detail to explain the factors which lead producing the greatest value from marketing spend:

• harnessing the marketing imagination to create value adding ideas
• predicting how much financial value these ideas will contribute
• delivering and demonstrating that value really was created
• establishing learning that will improve future ideas, predictions and results.

There’s a lot of thought-proving material here. Business success, as is rightly pointed out, happens when all the key players’ interests are effectively aligned to create value. This needs to happen in an environment where four key facets are allowed to develop and flourish: freedom, rigour, people and processes.

This report needs to be studied by those in senior marketing roles as well as board directors and those in finance. It advocates a well thought through and substantiated series of processes to maximise the return on ideas and to get better results from having finance and marketing working closely together.

Read Return on Ideas here