Enter the Metrics

How do you define how successful your company is? What are its metrics? How does the company’s mission and marketing strategy relate to key performance metrics and vice versa? These are three very important questions that the executives and middle managers must answer.  Metrics help to keep a company grounded in achieving their marketing strategy.  These metrics cannot just be a silver metric hat tells the company everything they need to know.  Metrics such as Return On Investment, market share and stock price are all externally driven and easy for outsiders to look at and view how well a company is doing.  Marketing efficiency or specific product relates metrics are more internal and help a company focus if they are achieving their marking goals. 

Dilbert also hits a good point regarding the data that is collected to evaluate the metrics.  As an engineer, I love myself a good set of data and always want more but if you do not know what you are looking for the data can be misleading.    The company must be focused on collecting data that will help answer the metrics for each goal. 

How should the marketing metrics be applied Pharmasim?  As a class the top metrics were decided upon for the final comparison of all teams in this experience but not all firms need to have the same metrics. Internally, a firm must be looking to prove their goals with the correct amount of data and analysis. A jet engine manufacturer will not have the same metrics as an electricity generation company because their goals are not going to be the same. In the article "Managing the Markeitng Metrics Portfolio" the companies of Hilton Hotels, JP Morgan and others are discussed for their key metrics.  None of them share the same metrics.  This can be looked at in Pharmasim too as my group my look for MEI, ROI and ROS as our key metrics and others mights look to gross margin and total unit sales.  These choices depend on what the goals are for Allround such as being the market leader or generating the most sales which are also dependent on their pricing strategy. All of these choices for pricing, marketing and advertising are all connected to the marketing goals and key metrics to be evaluated.

Variance analysis can help a company determine how well they are doing compared to forecasting.  By completing a variance analysis, the company can look at the volume and margin effects a companies bottom line.  The company can look at how their market share or pricing has affected the bottom line.  Also companies can look at their competitors and see how advertising or market share as affected them as well.  Variance analysis can help a company create better forecasts for their markets.

This week I decided that I would check out the blogs of Andrew,  Kenny,  and Ahmed.  Andrew has had in depth writings about Pharmasim.  He also looked to discuss the topics presented from the readings and class.  When we were asked to discuss our classmates blogs last week, he dissected them from many different aspects.  He quantified each persons responses and high lighted parts of each.   His blog did not use any pictures of links to help liven up his points.  Kenny broke up his blog into different sections with header and utilized lists.  This was a different way to present some of the information.  He analyzed the topics well and the discussion on predicting the future was interesting.  The last blog I looked at was Ahmed. Ahmed had great visuals to reinforce his points about the Wright Brothers.  His discussion on change was interesting as he looked at different diapers.  Overall these three blogs all have different perspective on what we are learning in class.

Working with Marty and Alexis has been very successful so far.  We have all has busy schedules (me driving a lot of the timing) and have utilized teleconference services to meet at varying times through the day. After we got together and reviewed our situational analysis, our key issues matched up well so we were able to quickly agree on what route to take for our marketing plan.  Also we have been happy with our progress and success as our stock price keeps rising though I know that is not a key metric and have continued to increase market share and profit.  I hope that we will be able to successfully work through the new four periods quickly and keep those trends continuing.