Satisfaction most popular factor for marketing decisions

Sydney, Aug 30 (IANS) Satisfaction is the most popular factor for marketing decisions around the world, according to a new study.

Satisfaction measures how satisfied a company's customers are with a company and its product or service. For the study published in the Journal of International Business Studies, Satisfaction was the most used metric in eight of the 16 countries studied
and was employed in 53 per cent of all marketing-mix decisions analysed.

The other two most popular metrics to help determine marketing strategy were Awareness and Return on Investment (ROI).

Awareness measures how many people recognise a company, brand, product or service and was used in 45 per cent of marketing plans. This was followed by ROI, which measures revenue generated per dollar spent on marketing and was used in 43 per cent of plans.

Other popular metrics included Target Volume, Likeability and Net Profit.

The researchers analysed more than 4,000 marketing plans from over 1,600 companies in 16 countries, including Australia, the US, Russia, India, the UK and China.

"We wanted to know what metrics managers are using globally, what drives metric use, including cultural influences, and how many metrics managers are using. In today's digital technology-intensive and data-rich environment, it is important for managers to know which metrics count," said study lead researcher Ofer Mintz from University of Technology, Sydney.

In each of the 16 countries, the study also found a significant and positive relationship between a company's total metric use and its marketing performance.

"Metrics provide information to help managers diagnose, coordinate and monitor their actions. They also quantify trends or outcomes, reveal current relationships, and help predict the results of future actions," Mintz added.

The study identified 84 different marketing and financial metrics in use, with managers employing on average around nine metrics per marketing-mix.

Country and organisational culture also had an impact on the types of analytics managers used.

South Korea, China and India had the highest use of metrics, while Japan, France and the US had the lowest use.

Managers residing in countries with a lower tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity employed significantly more metrics for their marketing decisions.