In Sickness and In Health: Exploring and Redeveloping a Measure of Marketing Effectiveness

No matter what condition an organisation may be in, assessing performance finds marketing management's day-to-day energies mostly devoted to matters of efficiency - that is doing things right - e.g. generating sufficient sales and profit, allocating the marketing budget, and controlling the marketing mix components etc. However, an organisation's performance and success depend more on effectiveness – that is doing the right things - than on doing thing right. Indeed, whilst organisations should be both efficient and effective, the starting point should be measurement of marketing effectiveness, for doing the wrong things efficiently is pointless.

A review of the academic literature reveals that several marketing effectiveness models exist but that there is no consensus as to which tile best measures are, or even agreement on one model that pulls the various strands into a convincing whole. This paper aims to provide a better measure of the construct, by up-rating an existing instrument's scale and adapting it to include items of structure, culture and learning in a sector specific measurement of marketing effectiveness in the UK aerospace industry.

This paper is designed to meet the needs of the practitioner who may not be satisfied with current measures, and the academic who is seeking empirical testing of new dimensions that add to and provide further debate on marketing effectiveness' body of knowledge. Based on a redeveloped scale the findings successfully captured eighteen items comprising marketing effectiveness in four discrete factors - Customer Philosophy, Strategic Perspective, Information Processing Capability, and Operational Marketing Proficiency.