High Performance Marketing:
Bringing Method to the
Madness of Marketing

By Naras Eechambadi
(Dearborn Trade Publishing, November 2005)

Brilliant marketing can be a tremendous engine for corporate growth, increasing profits and generating excitement among customers and employees. Not all marketers are brilliant, however, and not all marketing programs are successful. Marketing as a business function is being challenged as never before. Businesses are finding that the cost of communicating and dealing with increasingly choosy and fickle customers has ballooned in recent years; they’re also aware of the increasing complexity of managing customers across multiple channels. The leaders of these businesses want answers and accountability. Unfortunately, while many companies have made great strides in the supply-side areas of product development, supply chains and operational management, few companies have demonstrated the same types of innovations on the demand-side of their business. This lag in innovation creates an opportunity for marketing to step forward and close the gap between strategy and execution.

Marketing is being called on to rethink the way it operates, and to rigorously defend and validate its actions. While there is a great deal of attention being focused on the accountability of marketing at present, it’s important to recognize that such efforts are just a start. It is not enough for marketing to merely account for its activities, and then report its findings up the chain. What shareholders, board members and senior executives truly want is performance. Assessing a marketing program’s impact based on facts and figures rather than feelings and hunches requires an approach to marketing that is rigorous, repeatable and predictable from the inside and transparent from the outside.

Enhancing marketing results requires executives to address several dimensions of performance. High Performance Marketing explains these dimensions and how to use them to improve performance in a sustainable way. It emphasizes measurability and repeatability through well-defined, disciplined processes; it also promotes a learning culture that carefully tests and continually improves the performance of marketing campaigns.

Naras Eechambadi provides a practical perspective, coupled with usable tools, drawing on his experiences as a senior marketing executive and consultant with a leading global strategy consulting firm, as well as his unique perspective as a successful marketing entrepreneur. The case studies in this book are drawn from detailed executive interviews and reflect a powerful new shift in organizational strategy and marketing resource management. These case studies demonstrate that executives can realize extraordinary payoffs if they invest their limited marketing resources in a rigorous and disciplined way, not only in terms of marketing performance, but also by enabling huge gains in sales and service performance, as well as strengthened pricing power – leading to increased revenues and improved bottom line performance. As a result, the skills marketers learn in understanding and applying the framework discussed in this book will help them frame marketing issues and present marketing solutions effectively to CFOs, COOs, CEOs and other senior leaders who run the organization.

Disciplined marketers know that they won’t reach their ambitions merely by manipulating their segmentation and positioning efforts. They understand that to realize necessary levels of proficiency on this front, it is necessary to assess, develop and leverage all of the six fundamental factors of performance. Not all marketing organizations can expect to be equally proficient across all dimensions. Through a continuing cycle of improvement, marketing organizations identify the areas that require development as well as those that represent particular strength. They determine where they must invest to gain the levels of proficiency they seek. And they take the steps necessary to capitalize on the strengths they have built.

World-class marketers such as Harrah’s, Capital One, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of America, Procter and Gamble, Gillette, Lending Tree and Starbucks have grasped these new realities of marketing. Discipline drives dynamism. Dynamism, the flexibility to adapt marketing strategy to rapidly competitive landscapes and evolving customer needs, is an essential force in the continuing success of great companies. It is a premise underlying this book that high-performance marketing cultures must be infused with both rigor and vigor. Marketing, by its very nature, requires constant renewal. Ideas, whether they are products or messages, become stale through repetition. When is the right time to move over to a new message? What essence of the brand must be maintained as a constant thread through the new messaging or in new products? These and other questions can be answered through the marriage of the science and art of marketing, leading to a very disciplined and dynamic marketing culture.

The book concludes by highlighting three major shifts that are helping shape the future of marketing and discusses their implications.