Commenting on my last post on ‘stimulus-response’ Andrew Weir says: “In my humble view marketing should focus on delivering great brand experiences (experience of a product, service, brand) as well as brand promises (stimulus-response?). It is vital that the promise matches the experience (alignment).”

Thanks for your comment, Andrew. I agree with you on the delivering great experiences bit, but I think you might be missing my point about stimulus-response.

In my view, marketing is currently suffering from a bad case of schizophrenia.

On the one hand, marketers say their job is identify and meet peoples’ needs – or, as Andrew put, ‘deliver great brand experiences’. This is all about aligning what the company does to what the customer wants.

On the other hand, marketers also believe their job is persuasion, to change consumer attitudes and behaviours in their brand’s favour. Here, the marketer is trying to align what consumers do to what the company wants.

Sometimes they might amount to the same thing. Sometimes they are complete opposites – and that’s the point: this ‘sometimes’ is a source of endless confusion.

I now believe it lies behind marketing’s current metrics impasse. When marketers measure the effects of their marketing activities, what are they measuring? How good they were at aligning what they did to their customers’ priorities? Or how good they were at changing customer attitudes and behaviours?

As long as we jumble these opposites up in the same metrics, our metrics will never tell us much. We are measuring chalk and cheese at the same time, without being able to distinguish the two.

In my view this isn’t a trivial problem. It’s a roadblock stopping the progress of marketing: it means we have to rethink marketing metrics from scratch: do we actually know what we are measuring?

I’ve written more about this in Marketing magazine this week.

Alan Mitchell     www.ctrl-shift.co.uk