Should marketers have a ‘universal’ framework for effectiveness?

It’s all well and good as a marketer being told you need to sort out your approach to effectiveness. But how do you do it?

As part of the Currency of Effectiveness series, sponsored by Digitas, held by Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing earlier this year, marketing leaders came together to discuss the core principles of marketing effectiveness.

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson was joined by former Eve Sleep CEO Cheryl Calverley, LinkedIn B2B Institute’s Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, and Digitas’s chief strategy officer Matt Holt for the session.

Ritson argued that good CMOs build their own approach to marketing effectiveness. “They have the confidence to know that it may not be perfect because such a thing does not exist, but they have built their idea of what marketing effectiveness is,” he said.

Four experts on the ‘laws and loopholes’ of achieving marketing effectivenessCalverley, however, disagreed. “I don’t think every good marketer builds their own effectiveness. I think every good marketer builds the right opinion of effectiveness for their business and category, and that will change as you change categories.”

Some marketers have become “arrogant,” she added, suggesting they’ve forgotten that marketing is meant to be in service of a business.

Elsewhere in the session, Weinberg suggested there should be a set of “universal principles” for marketers to follow in the name of marketing effectiveness. “I think there’s a problem in marketing where the answer is always ‘it depends’. There’s no right or wrong way to do anything. And I don’t know how helpful that’s been to the practice of marketing, because it means anyone with a microphone can opine upon the best way to do [it],” he said.

Watch the video above for the full discussion.

The Currency of Effectiveness is brought to you in partnership with System 1, Ebiquity, Salesforce, Digitas, Ozone, Little Dot Studios.