Marketing effectiveness
Improve measurement and understand marketing's commercial contribution.
Effectiveness is not the same as efficiency. A campaign can hit every efficiency benchmark and still not move the business.
Without a shared definition of effectiveness, every function measures what makes it look good, and nobody trusts the reporting.
"If it's measurable, it's working."
Measurable and incremental are different things. Most reporting confuses them.
"We need a better dashboard."
More often you need fewer, better-chosen measures that connect to a commercial outcome.
"Effectiveness is marketing's problem to solve."
It's a leadership agreement about what counts as value. Marketing can't set that alone.
Anton's perspective
The best marketing strategy isn't the one with the most initiatives. It's the one with the clearest choices.
I've assessed a very large volume of customer interaction data over the years. The consistent pattern is that organisations measure what is easy to count long before they measure what matters.
Sometimes the most useful marketing advice is knowing what not to do.
Define what commercial result marketing is accountable for contributing to.
Pick the smallest set that would genuinely change a decision.
Build a practical way to estimate what wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Make the reporting trigger a decision on a fixed cadence, or it will be ignored.
Free tool
If you want a structured read on where you stand, the Customer Value Diagnostic takes about seven minutes and gives you an immediate, personalised view across five dimensions.
AI comes up in almost every one of these conversations now. I've written up the questions I get asked most, and my plain answers, in AI in marketing: where it creates value.
Evidence
OES
Fifteen points across the go-to-market model were assessed independently. The recommendation was to flip the funnel toward value rather than volume, fewer, better-qualified students rather than more of them.
Michael Smolders, Executive Director Sales & Marketing, OES
Read the full OES story →The Laptop Initiative
A charity founded in 2024, describing itself as laptop recycling. Repositioned around recognising opportunity, which changed who would fund it and why.
Cheryl Sing, Founder, The Laptop Initiative
Read the full The Laptop Initiative story →Not necessarily. Modelling is one tool. Most organisations get further, faster, by fixing what they're measuring and why before they invest in modelling.
Because positioning decides whether customers understand why they should choose you before a single campaign runs. Unclear or undifferentiated positioning makes every downstream activity work harder for a worse result, messaging, lead generation, conversion, all of it. Get the positioning right and marketing investment compounds instead of fighting confusion.
Stop measuring activity and start measuring contribution: acquisition, retention, profitability, customer value, growth. That requires clear business objectives and a genuine understanding of which customers and opportunities create the most value, not just more dashboards. Marketing earns its seat at the table when it can show commercial outcomes, not campaign counts.
Small. A focused review of one part of the investment often produces enough evidence to reshape the rest.
Determine whether marketing investment is creating sufficient commercial value.
Identify which customers create value, where growth exists and where investment should be prioritised.
Challenge assumptions and gain an experienced external view before making an important decision.
No brief required. Start with the situation you're facing.
