Value
Anton Buchner, Founder, Front Foot Marketing Last updated 8 August 2026
Is marketing actually creating value?
The question behind the question
Did marketing work?
Where did marketing create value, and where did it leak?
The straight answer
Revenue isn't customer value. Activity isn't commercial impact.
Marketing can generate traffic, leads, awareness, engagement and even revenue without creating meaningful value for the business.
The question I'd actually ask is whether marketing is influencing behaviour in a way that contributes to profitable customer value, not whether the activity report looks busy.
The deeper answer
That means looking past campaign metrics.
Who are we attracting?
Why are they choosing us?
What value do they create?
What does it cost to acquire, serve and retain them?
What happens to margin as they move through the relationship?
A marketing program can look successful in isolation and still destroy value once you look at it through the economics of the whole customer relationship.
That's the reason I start with customer value rather than marketing activity, using what I call the Customer Value Model.
If you want a structured read on where value is being created, take the Customer Value Diagnostic.
The uncomfortable bit
The campaign everyone's proudest of is sometimes the one quietly losing the business money once you account for who it actually brought in.
What we know
- What revenue, traffic and leads marketing generated this period
- Roughly what it cost to acquire the customers involved
What we don't
- Whether those customers would have shown up anyway
- What they'll cost to serve and retain over their lifetime, not just to acquire
What we need to decide anyway: Whether to keep funding this activity at this level, or redirect it, before the full lifetime picture is in.
What I'd challenge
I'd challenge the idea that more marketing activity is evidence of more marketing value. Busy and valuable aren't the same thing, and the gap between them is usually where the money leaks.
The Anton Test
If we stopped this campaign tomorrow, what would actually happen to revenue, and how confident are we in that answer?
What I'd do next
I'd start by mapping revenue against margin and cost to serve for the last twelve months, by customer segment. Not more campaign data. The P&L, cut properly.
The decision
This is ultimately a decision about where to keep funding activity and where to pull back, before the next commitment gets made.
This connects to the broader decision on Customer value, if you want the fuller picture.
Keep asking
Related answers
Value
Are we growing the right customers?
Not every customer is equally valuable, and not every source of growth deserves more investment.
Effectiveness
What should our marketing dashboard actually tell us?
A dashboard should help you make a decision. If it doesn't, it's probably just reporting.
Decision
What decision are we actually trying to make?
This is often the question that should come first.
Still working out what the real question is?
Sometimes the hardest part isn't finding the answer. It's knowing which question to ask.