Marketing Metrics - The Old and The New

As the year comes to an end it is a good time to ponder what is old and what is new. My previous post focuses on what is new, looking at some of the top marketing trends for 2008. Today I want to make a brief comment about making the distinction between the old and the new.

I read an a recent article in Chief Marketer which discusses "a new way to allocate marketing resources". The article focuses on an excellent description of an approach that suggests three key stages of marketing optimization: 1. Campaign optimization, 2. Contact optimization (using predictive analysis on your customer data to optimize communication over a business cycle), and 3. Market Mix optimization (correlating sales data with marketing efforts across the enterprise). The approach outlined makes sense, but is it really new? Haven't marketers been pursuing the Holy Grail of market mix optimization for more than 40 years? The theoretical approach isn't new. It's old. What is new is the advancement of technology, allowing more sophisticated databases, data anaysis and insight development. The theory and the stages aren't new, our improving capabilities to achieve them are.