Engaging marketing in performance measurement

Marketing has habitually avoided performance measurement, pleading difficulties with quantification of its activities and their outcomes. As a result, in many companies marketing has become marginalized to a straightforward marketing communications, whereas, it should hold a pivotal role in the identification of customer needs, specification of the value sought and demand generation, interpreted in its widest sense. This paper shows how marketing and the rest of the organization should relate to each other in the process of customer and value development and delivery, on which business performance depends. It discusses the importance of marketing in four constituents of performance measurement; resources, processes, products/services and financial performance. The CIMBA model of marketing processes is used to demonstrate that there can be no return on marketing investment without delivery through core operations. The paper concludes that marketing and business performance measurement are indispensable to each other.