The Mandate for Accountability
Brand awareness, brand knowledge, customer satisfaction, and many of the other elements that drive brand equity are intangible. Thus measurement is more complicated than simply looking at sales and profits, but a wide range of information-collecting technology that tracks sales and profitability enables companies to evaluate MC efforts. Scanner data, customer databases, and automated customer-service operations generate enormous amounts of marketing data. In many companies, the primary challenge is not collecting more information but finding the time to analyze and make use of the data that already exists.
One of the most important ways to meet this challenge is to measure and evaluate brand messages by monitoring responses from the different brand messages and campaigns that are used. This chapter also discusses two types of IMC audits: the mini-audit and the in-depth audit. It considers evaluation and measurement of brand messages in general before looking at specific methods. It ends with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of evaluation.
