Marketing Tools, September 1997, p. 64-67
Front-end Alignment: Auditing to Make the Brand Relationship-Building Process More Effective and Efficient
by Tom Duncan and Sandra Moriarty
In recent years, companies have found that traditional evaluation research, such as tracking studies, sales and share reports, and customer satisfaction studies, no longer provide sufficient input for their marketing plans. The solution is to look at the upfront processes and develop methods that improve the alignment between the front end of the marketing planning process and the desired output.
With today's marketplace conditions, emphasis must now be placed on retaining and growing the value of existing customers, as much as on acquiring new ones. Consequently, companies are setting up cross-functional processes and making other structural changes to better manage brand relationships. This means there is an increaisng need to audit these internal processes tomake sure that they are, in fact, integrated, and operating efficiently and effectively.
There are two basic ways to evaluate to how a company is managing its business. One is output controls such as tracking studies, copytesting, sales figures, and basic marketing research studies. The other is process controls. Although process controls such as financial audits have been used for years, few companies have a system for auditing the processes they use for managing brand relationships. The importance of process management has also been stimulated by TQM and ISO 9000 standards. Both require companies to continuously monitor all their processes and procedures in an ongoing effort to improve them.
Recognizing this, we designed the Integrated Marketing (IM) Audit and made it a key component of ...