MAN6685 Measuring Marketing Effectiveness Assessment-Individual Coursework

Coursework Brief: 

In this assignment you are invited to play the role of a marketing analyst and performance measurement consultant. This is the next bastion of marketing consultancy, with companies actively seeking the support and guidance of experts like Koen Pauwels and Tim Ambler for measuring their marketing effectiveness and designing systems that continuously track marketing performance. 
To this end, your task is four-fold, as you are expected to select a relevant and suitable company or brand to analyse. For this company you will design an MPM System and then: 

• A brief overview of the company and the industry/market in which it operates [Task 1] 
• Provide a relevant assessment of the company’s level of marketing effectiveness based on a numeric assessment and analysis of five of your marketing metrics [Task 2]. 
• With the remaining five key marketing metrics, provide a critical elaboration on why they are included in your system. You should also evaluate potential considerations that (you think) the company should be cognisant of [Task 3].
• From your analysis (primarily part 1), discuss how the company could improve and become more effective, presenting a series of practical but cogently justified (preferably with academic theory or case example) suggestions. You should also design a dashboard visualization of your 10 marketing metrics (KPI’s) for use by key stakeholders internal to the organisation. You should aim to populate the dashboard with data collected for Task 1, whilst simulating data for those in Task 2. A brief elaboration of your decision-making should also be included [Task 4]. 

This assignment tests your understanding and application of marketing metrics for the purpose of measuring marketing effectiveness; please make sure you review key textbooks, such as Bendle et al. (2017). Additionally, you need to collect and utilise secondary information from different sources, such as company websites, annual reports, market research reports (e.g. Mintel, Euromonitor Passport), social media sites and databases (more details given in seminar 4). You are also strongly recommended to look up and refer to relevant articles both from academic journals (e.g. Journal of Marketing) and from management press (e.g., Business Week, Forbes, HBR) for strong argumentation. External information should be clearly and consistently referred to in the report. 

Guidelines / Key Contents:

 You are to present your MPM system (dashboard) with key findings and recommendations of your work to the head of the marketing department in the company of your choice. As such, you are expected to present the following: 

[Executive summary / Introduction]: 

• A short self-standing executive summary (i.e. abstract) 

[Task 1] A brief overview of the company and the industry/market in which it operates. You may wish to: 

• briefly discuss key determinants of the company, such as its size, type of offering, strategic approach, targeting and competitive positioning. If you would prefer to focus on a specific market (i.e. Google in the UK), strategic business unit (SBU) or brand, this is fine (and remains the decision of the student). 
• briefly discuss the characteristics of the business environment, such as intensity of competition, key sources of competitive advantage, and emerging industry trends. 

Note: focusing on facts and insights that helps create stronger argumentation for the inclusion of metrics in your MPM system is a sensible strategy. 

[Task 2] Provide a relevant assessment of the company’s current marketing effectiveness

• The assessment is to be based on five marketing metrics, and so: 

• Select metrics from your MPM system which you are confident you have access to reliable data for. 
• Strive for comprehensiveness and coverage; the metrics should cover at least three of the topic areas from the module (topic 1 – 9). Narrowly focusing on only one or two topic areas (e.g. “financial metrics” and “mindset metrics”) might provide insufficient perspective on current marketing effectiveness. 
• If you need to calculate metrics yourself, document and evidence the process in the main body of the report or in the appendix. 
• Put performance into context using relevant internal and/or external benchmarks.
• Provide, where possible, a review of what the results might suggest about the company’s marketing effectiveness. For instance, (i) in which area(s) is the company performing well or problematically, and (ii) what might the reason or explanation be? 

[Task 3] Critically appraise the remaining five key metrics and why they play a significant role in the strategic decision making process. Pay attention to justifying the choice of each of your metrics carefully. You do not need to have gathered data for these metrics. Instead, focus on providing: 

• A critical review of the suitability and value-added of each for the case company, with a particular focus on the “considerations” that a marketing manager needsto be cognisant of when employing the metric in their MPM system / dashboard. 
• There are many ways to critically appraise a metric (i.e. the “considerations”), but ideally you would use academic/managerial literature, as well as (where relevant and no prior literature is available) your own critical thinking (i.e. we will practice this in the module). 
• (Again) strive for comprehensiveness; ensure that at least three topic areas from lectures / seminars are represented in Task 3. 

[Task 4] Provide concrete recommendations for the company on how it could become more effective and better able to track its marketing effectiveness: 

• Drawing on the key findings of your assessment, what kind of adjustments would you introduce? Be specific (e.g., you could discuss specific marketing activities you recommend for the company in order to enhance its level of customer satisfaction or awareness within its target audience). Just as an illustration: is the category saturated? Is brand penetration very high? What practical things can the brand do to keep growing? Provide suggestions. 
• Using the 10 metrics comprising your MPM system present a dashboard of marketing metrics the company could use to routinely manage its marketing performance in the future: 

1. Provide a simple visualisation of the proposed dashboard (note: you may simulate data for Task 2 metrics) 
2. Provide a brief discussion of the dashboard. You might, for example, want to elaborate on the following: How are the “rules” of designing an MPM system reflected in your work (i.e. dashboard)? What would be a useful benchmark for the metric? How often should the company measure and report each metric? How do the proposed metrics, in combination, help the company manage its business? If, and when, parameters signal success or danger. 

Conclusions / Appendix 

• Provide a concise overall summary/conclusion of the report. 
• Provide a full reference list (Harvard [see further particulars below]). 
• Appendices to include tables, calculations and/or graphics that are not important enough to belong in the main body but still provide relevant evidence of the student’s work should be employed. 
  We will touch upon some of the characteristics of a “decent” report during class, but as a general overview, you should bear in mind the following:
• We only have limited time together, which affects the amount of content we are able to cover. As such we only cover a small number of metrics in a population of thousands. It is therefore perfectly acceptable (in fact, recommended) that you independently employ metrics not covered in class (when relevant to do so!). 
• Strive to adopt a critical and constructive view supported by a range of external information, not just personal opinions. When referring to other people’s work, please use clear and consistent academic referencing. 
• You are not expected to conduct primary research for this assessment. However, using theoretical literature and reliable secondary information (such as market research reports, firm websites, annual reports, social media sites, library databases, and articles from popular press and academic journals) is important for clear and convincing argumentation. You will need to find the relevant supporting information – it should be clear by final year that this information needs to have integrity and hold up to scrutiny. 
• For assessment of effectiveness, please provide full transparency so that it is clear to the reader how the analysis was performed (e.g. insert key findings in the body of the text, and calculations into appendices, etc.). 
• Whilst a natural starting place is a company report (predominantly for establishing mission and objectives) simply cherry-picking metrics from this would be very much ill-advised. 
• The report should be understood as a standalone document. Being able to clearly communicate key findings and recommendations to relevant stakeholders (e.g. head of the marketing department and other members of the top management team), using attractive methods to visualize the results (i.e. charts/figures / dashboard) will be credited.