1. Many of us fill out feedback surveys from really big outfits (this includes philanthropies and service orgs, not just product sellers) that show incredibly crude approaches to the nuances of impact, nuances that clearly are linked to future buying and other tangible changes in behavior. And how many of those surveys bother to ask for suggestions about improving the survey (not just the product or service)? Precious few, that’s how much systematic self-improvement is going on. So we know that for all the hard-nosed ROI adherents, there’s plenty of slippage in getting a grip on even hard-core ROI, i.e., plenty of bad marketing practice, despite the rhetoric.

2. Perhaps even more importantly, there is plenty of evidence that the hard nose ROI’rs don’t even bother to use the data that is already there without doing any more market research. It’s buried in the time-stamped negative feedback publicly available on the websites of the big retailers like Amazon. Focus on the detailed feedback provided by unhappy campers when their numbers get up into the scores (i.e. enough to reduce chances of feedback faked by competitors’ hirelings), and span several years of reports of simple failures, rude online ‘help,’ and failures to improve bad design, and you’re seeing a disconnect between marketing and production/design that means there’s a serious problem in the organization’s management of marketing data.

In other words, for 1% to 5% of the cost of a new marketing effort, a few days work by a smart evaluator would show how to get big results on basic ROI, and then the client might start in on the nuances from the Forbes article that will surely yield still further gains. Dissing them would be worth listening to if the critics showed signs of basic competence.

Michael Scriven

The show has been going for a couple of months. There were four designers in last night’s final. In true TV fashion, the judges commented on all the designers’ work without giving a hint about who they would choose…. then an ad break …. then the winner was announced – a woman from Trinidad Tabago.

Since then my mind has been side tracked … why did they choose her and not one of the other great designers? What criteria were they using? (she couldn’t sew when she started the competition) … and so on. Hah, the joys of being an evaluator …….

Put an RFP out for a longitudinal study of say 2-3 years and only 1 month till RFP closing date….lol lol…

and counting the many more to respond…

Thank you both for your views you have added to my understanding of value for cultural expertise and others. I like the way you both have re-framed the value of that specific area of skill and knowledge. I’ll take that with me on my journey as an emerging evaluator and researcher.

Will come back soon. Manaakitia e korua

Na
Tarina