Marketing’s situation with metrics has an analogy with the metrics turmoil currently embroiling physics and astronomy. Back in 1998, cosmologists realised that 75% of the universe is made up of something their measuring instruments had never measured before: dark energy.

Writing about dark energy, Scientific American noted that it almost certainly shapes the evolution of the universe – stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters. “Astronomers have been staring at its handiwork for decades without realizing it.”

I think something similar is happening with customer metrics. It’s the customer’s metrics that shape the evolution of markets, big and small. But because marketing metrics only measure the marketer’s side of things – how much marketing campaigns and activities cost and what ‘changes’ they induce to the marketer’s metrics (brand awareness, sales uplifts etc) – they have failed to measure something (to ape Scientific American’s words) that “holds the fate of the cosmos/market in its grip, but to which we are almost totally blind”.

The usual objection to this is “Ah! We do have customer metrics – we measure customer satisfaction.” That’s all well and good, but it’s not good enough on two counts.

First, customers measure what is important to them, not what is important to marketers. Marketers want to know how valuable or satisfying their product is; customers want to know the relative costs and benefits of alternative ways of achieving desired outcomes or goals in their lives. Marketers need to know how their products or services fit in to this broader customer perspective.

Second, customer metrics cannot be reduced to a single money number. In addition to money, I think there are at least five other dimensions of value people’s behaviours are shaped by:

o    time costs and benefits (Accenture has recently recognised the importance of this theme in this article);
o    the physical work/energy required to achieve the desired outcome;
o    the information, knowledge and skills that are needed as a pre-requisite to achieving this outcome or which need to be acquired or shared;
o    the emotions generated along the way (positive or negative); and
o    the amount of attention the customer has to, versus wants to, devote to it.

Quite simply, marketing ‘works’ when it improves these customer metrics. This applies to both the product itself and its marketing, and it’s the marketer’s job to work out which metrics the customer is trying to improve and how to do this. Of course, this is impossible if we don’t know what these metrics are.

In its article, Scientific American said dark energy’s discovery will almost certainly require the development of new theories of physics. It will also require the development of new measuring instruments/approaches. I think the same is true of customer metrics and marketing.

Our current approach to metrics is not the way forward it’s so widely touted to be: e.g. the way to ‘demonstrating accountability’ and therefore ‘boardroom credibility’. It’s what is actually holding us back.

Alan Mitchell     www.ctrl-shift.co.uk