Book review : Marketing calculator
October 2nd, 2011
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Measuring and managing return on marketing investment, that’s the promise of the book from Guy R. Powell. A famous quote in marketing is : Half of my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half (John Wannamacher). Indeed, how many marketing initiative are rigorously evaluated? No doubt price cuts increase volumes, but how often does it to improve the top line, not even talking about the bottom line. This book is about putting some analytics in marketing and knowing the truth.
Predicting the number of sales representatives on a particular time on a particular store is harder than expected. If you instrument the whole process, you could know the activity of your representatives (number of customers, average time of a transaction, activity rate, …). We could then predict the number of required representatives. We know the cost of having set too much of them but what is the cost of having to few representatives? How to value a missed opportunity, a customer unsatisfaction of the quality of service, the behaviour of a too much stressed employee?