Choosing the right benchmark

Fiona Blades

Using examples from Delta Air Lines, Lynx, Wilkinson Sword and Sky Television, this article explains how to tie in marketing metrics with the goals of the overall organisation and how to isolate the impact of marketing’s paid efforts to get close to people’s real experiences of the brand.

Benchmarking marketing activity

This article is part of a series of articles on benchmarking marketing activity. Read more.

'The meaning of life is 42.' It's the very definition of a meaningless number, the embodiment of spurious certainty. And without benchmarks, research-based measures of performance can be dismissed as equally unactionable. Everything's relative – we can only act on a result if we know if it's good or bad. So benchmarks are a fundamentally important part of our decision-making.

However, pick the wrong benchmarks and we risk taking the wrong decisions. Worse still, if we don't properly contextualise these...

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