Many Jamaican companies spend countless millions of dollars on marketing communications every year.

Hey! Can you guess how much the title sponsor will spend on the ISSA Boys and Girls Championship Sports in Jamaica this year? More than most of us will earn in a lifetime! But when you ask marketing or communications managers what they will get in return for their money, very few, if any, can tell you.

Well, here is our position on that matter.

If your marketer tells you that he can’t quantify the return on your investment in marketing communications, send him back to marketing school!

ESTABLISHING COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVES

Senior managers, especially the CEO and CFO, want to know the outcomes and revenues resulting from their communications investments.

Too often, however, their marketing/communications directors supply only inputs and expenses: press clipping counts, numbers of ads placed, or media costs.

In fairness, marketing/communications directors try to translate inputs into intermediate outputs such as reach and frequency (the percentage of target market exposed to a communication and the number of exposures), recall and recognition scores, persuasion changes, Facebook likes, and cost-per-thousand calculations. But is that enough in the current era? We think not!

Ultimately, behaviour-change measures capture the real payoff. But first you must establish a reasonable set of marketing communications objectives.

What might these objectives be? They are probably dependent on the product life cycle stage. But let us assume that you have implemented a set of carefully considered marketing communication activities to meet these objectives. At the end of it, the impact must be measured.

MEASURING COMMUNICATIONS RESULTS

Members of the target audience from your communications should be asked whether they recognise or recall the message, how many times they saw it, what points they recall, how they felt about the message, and what are their previous and current attitudes toward the product and the company.

The communicator should also collect behavioural measures of audience response, such as how many people bought the product, liked it, and talked to others about it.

Let us imagine that our favourite Jamaican food company, GraSco, just launched two new flavours of coolers: brand A and brand B, and having invested heavily in marketing communications, want to know the result. Here is an example of good feedback measurement, but you may not like the results.

Feedback on brand A:

• 80 per cent of the consumers in the total market are aware of brand A

• 60 per cent have tried it

• 20 per cent who tried it are satisfied and will buy again.

This indicates that the communications programme is effective in creating awareness, but the product fails to meet consumer expectations. Not good. Flogging a dead horse? Who knows? Time for further analysis.

Feedback on brand B

In contrast, feedback from the second communications campaign was quite different.

• 40 per cent of the consumers in the total market are aware of brand B

• 30 per cent have tried it

• 80 per cent of them are satisfied and will buy again.

In this case, the communications programme needs to be strengthened to take advantage of the brand’s potential power.

Admittedly this was just a primer on measuring communication effectiveness. But one thing is certain, you will never again accept the argument that you cannot measure the result of a marketing communications activity or campaign. Those days are long gone.

Herman D Alvaranga FCIM, MBA, is president of the Caribbean School of Sales Management (CSSM), the region’s first Public Training College specialising in sales and marketing education, training, consulting and research. E-mail hdalvaranga@cssm.edu.jm.