When Art Meets Science:
The Challenge of ROI Marketing

It's a question as old as business itself: How can a company be sure it's spending the right amount of money on the right kind of marketing so that it can sell more products or services to increase profitability and, ultimately, enhance shareholder value?

To be sure, some marketers, especially those from data-rich consumer packaged goods companies or direct marketing firms, are able, with some precision, to determine how much bang they receive for the bucks they spend on a newspaper advertisement or a price reduction. But in general the marketing discipline has always been more art than science; corporations spend untold billions on marketing without any exacting way of determining how much the resulting "brand equity" or "consumer awareness" contributes to the bottom line.

Most marketing executives have always felt that they have little choice but to throw money at the wall and hope that at least some of it would stick. That kind of thinking, however, is changing, according to experts at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. These days, chief marketing officers and the people who work for them are under increased pressure to make marketing more of a quantifiable science than an ephemeral art. Numbers-driven CEOs and CFOs demand to know how efficiently their companies' marketing dollars are being put to use.

In response, a management concept known as ROI marketing is evolving to help executives better understand how they can spend their dollars to attain the highest possible return on their marketing investment...

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