Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success

Citation

Palmer, A. (2008), "Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success", Direct Marketing: An International Journal, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 248-249. https://doi.org/10.1108/17505930810931044

Integrated marketing sounds fine in theory, but in a marketing environment with proliferating media and routes to market, getting a handle on how they all fit together can give even the best marketer a headache. This book provides essential reading for those who continue to have no more than warm, fuzzy thoughts about how different marketing channels relate to each other. Are your retail stores costing an arm and a leg to keep open? Don't worry, just treat them as a form of “free” promotion for the company's web site, and hide their cost. This kind of thinking is anathema to the analytic, metrics driven approach advocated in this book. The central premise is that for effective multi‐channel marketing, it is essential to measure not only the effectiveness of each channel in isolation, but the broader effects on other channels. So, don't just keep the stores open in the vague hope that they will somehow “help the web site” – find ways instead of measuring the spending and profitability of customers who first made contact through your store, but make their actual purchase through your web site.

It is clear that the author's primary interests relate to the internet. The internet makes available metrics which were simply unimaginable little more than a decade ago, and the author gives us a clear and authoritative guide to the metrics most commonly used, with comments on their limitations. In fact, although the title of the book might imply some equality between the channels that a company might use, this is really a book that has the Internet as its focus.

Arikan is very careful in the inferences that can be made from raw statistics, and throughout the book, is at pains to distinguish between cause and correlation. The author gives the example of somebody who has seen an online advert for an airline, clicks on this to go through to the airline's website and makes a booking. While there is a correlation between the advert and sales, the cause of the booking could lie in a range of other media or channels. This leads to the need to develop experimental research frameworks in which target groups' exposure to messages can be controlled, and differences between experimental and control groups noted. The author provides some useful suggestions for trying to infer cause from correlation.

Of course, not everything can be measured, and Arikan cites Einstein's famous quotation that “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. This book does not really delve into the world of anthropologists who have been recruited by many online companies in an attempt to get a softer perspective on causal relationships in an online, multichannel environment. The author's response is to develop ever more sophisticated metrics, and by linking metrics from different channels, a better picture of consumers, and return on investment, will emerge.

The book is very clearly written, with refreshingly restrained use of jargon. Even where jargon is used, there are helpful vignettes which give very lucid explanations. Many of the principles are illustrated with graphics, which again are easy to understand. The author is based in America, and most of the examples used relate to his own business experience in America. However, this book does not come over as a brash American centric book which uses idiosyncratic American language to show the rest of the world how to do things. The author has sought to use a style of writing which will appeal to readers everywhere, and includes examples of leading‐edge practices from around the world. In this respect, an example of paying for car parking in Edinburgh by mobile phone is interesting.

Authors of books related to the internet face the inevitable problem that by the time the ink is dry, the world of the internet would have moved on. There are two areas in which this book is already showing signs of becoming dated‐peer to peer networks, and location based services. However, the author provides a valuable grounding in the fundamentals which underlie these developments, so to a certain extent has made the book future proof. There is also a companion web site, frequently cited throughout the book, which contains working examples, and updated news.

This book would particularly appeal to people who are working in one field of a multi‐channel environment, and would benefit from a bigger picture. The accessible style, and high message to word ratio make this a good read for busy managers who need to learn more about measuring the performance of their business in an increasingly fragmented, multi‐channel environment.