Volume 15 (2023): Issue 1 (May 2023)
Marketing Dashboards – The Next Generation

An effective dashboard integrates data, processes and viewpoints to show what happened, why it happened and what could happen with the right remedial action. It serves as a communication tool for what is important to the organization and helps to align all parties to the right objectives. It also serves as an aid in decision-making and goal attainment and the pathway to get there. The dashboards of the future need to be dynamic and constantly adapting to changing market conditions. They should include the long-term effects of marketing spending. Artificial intelligence has already made great strides in automating parts of dashboard development and can write out human language stories based on statistical evidence. AI can generate graphs and allow dashboard users to verbalize hypotheses to be tested in follow-up research.

Marketers are using metrics to diagnose, coordinate and monitor customer relationships and marketing efforts, set benchmarking goals to guide marketing implementation, and communicate the results of marketing outcomes with internal and external stakeholders.

Even if the number of available metrics is striking, some studies found support for the idea that the more metrics managers employed for their decisions, the better the marketing performance. Studies by the author also showed that using non-financial marketing metrics, such as awareness, willingness to recommend and loyalty, seemed to be associated with better marketing mix performance outcomes than using financial metrics, such as target volume, NPV and net profit. Developing a customer-centric organizational structure encourages managers to consider and develop a greater reliance on metrics.

Many metrics used to evaluate brick and mortar channels have equivalents online, but there are also some new metrics that marketers should monitor. Distribution breadth and depth refer to how easily a consumer can find a store that stocks the brand and find the brand within the store. Being findable online where and when consumers search for the category is just as crucial.

In a successful cooperation, neither distribution partner can afford to focus only on ist own performance at the expense of the other—at least not for too long. The partnership must be profitable for both, so both perspectives require monitoring. Suppliers need to understand where their target market searches and when, why and where it buys to decide where they should expand and who they should reward.

Many businesses have turned to ESG reporting to satisfy the informational needs of their external and internal stakeholders. ESG stands for environmental, social and governance metrics – both qualitative and quantitative – to highlight how well or poorly a firm is doing in terms of long-run sustainability. Investors and governments as well as customers and employees are becoming more and more concerned with ESG issues. ESG dashboard metrics serve as a means of accountability for all parties concerned and contribute to ensuring that the business adheres to its ESG commitments. Companies should use a purpose-driven approach with strong commitment from management and use cross-functional teams from areas including supply chain, technology and infrastructure to formulate a plan to integrate ESG metrics for reporting and identify gaps and deficiencies in current practices.

Compensation packages including incentives tied to a company’s stock price can be powerful motivators for corporate leaders. But the authors’ study also showed that these motivations can produce some serious unintended consequences. Equity incentives can tempt CMOs to engage in short-sighted marketing management such as cutting R&D and advertising spending in an effort to inflate current earnings and enhance the company’s stock price. This myopic management boosts their personal earnings at the expense of their company’s long-term performance. Our findings highlight the pitfalls and limitations of overreliance on equity in managerial compensation packages.

Companies could continue to pay their C-level executives based on stock price performance but defer the payout to the future until the long-term consequences of their decisions become apparent. This would reduce the temptation to act on short-term impulses to boost equity compensation.

Executives consistently rank brand reputation risk among the top three overall risk challenges facing their businesses. This risk is the possible damage to a brand’s overall standing, stature and esteem that derives from negative signals regarding the brand.

Successful brand stewardship requires ongoing tracking and monitoring of four marketing-strategy-related sources of reputational risks to brands: brand architecture strategies, digital marketing strategies, person-brand strategies and corporate socio-political activism. The authors provide ideas for metrics that a dashboard to manage brand reputation risk might contain. From the analysis of monitoring data, brands can, among other things, assess the level of severity of a specific brand reputation risk issue, the frequency of certain types of events, alternate response scenarios and the effectiveness of their actions.

Beyond striving for financial success, the purpose of a business can be the creation of customer benefits but also positive third-party effects—a purpose beyond profit. Quantifying a company’s purpose beyond profit is no easy task, but it is highly relevant. The presented perceived purpose score is an example of a validated and theoretically grounded quantification of brands’ purpose from a consumer perspective. The authors found a positive correlation between the NPS and brands’ perceived care for third parties, supporting the assumption that engagement with social or environmental causes can pay off. This research lays the foundation for a more systematic, rigorous investigation of purpose beyond profit.

Interview with Neil Hoyne, Chief Measurement Strategist at Google

Dashboards are a common tool for managers to monitor a company’s performance, and since the COVID-19 pandemic they have gained popularity among even broader audiences. But what is the real use of these dashboards? Is it just performance art or is it a tool that provides managers with the information they need? It may be slightly astonishing that Google employee Neil Hoyne is no fan of dashboards, but he believes they can be toxic when taken out of context. In this interview, he explains his skepticism of monitoring the same KPIs quarter after quarter and suggests different ways to make dashboards more strategically useful to companies. In his view, dashboards should inspire questions and curiosity, reflect market context and align toward specific business initiatives. He also suggests a more professional use of data and favors the scientific inquiry of the relationship between marketing measures and business outcomes.