Why am I here?
ROI. It is one of my favorite acronyms. A lot of people don’t seem to to realize how important ROI is, not just in business, but in everyday life. Simply put, return on investment or is about measuring what you are putting in to any specific endeavor, and measuring that against what you are getting out of it.
Case in point: I am looking at moving to a larger apartment right now, so that my wife can have a study, where she can work on her Ph.D. (she’s studying Art History with a focus on Tiepolo’s Punchinello works). The new apartment costs approximately 25% more than the old. It has about 17% more space. Obviously, that doesn’t quite get to the utility of having that extra room for her — square footage is not what she’s looking for; she’s just trying to get a door she can close to get away from our younger dog — but it’s a decent start.
When it comes to marketing efforts, often no one seems to want to even get to that “decent start” point. There are many “fluffier” aspects of where ROI calculations are quite tricky, and because of that, some seem to not even try in the first place. This is simply unacceptable. You wouldn’t even think about upgrading apartments and spending more money without trying to see if it was worthwhile, would you? Yet, at the same time, many marketing executives will do far less due diligence when it comes to spending other people’s money — often, hundreds or thousands times more capital.
It’s true: there are many different marketing initiatives and organization can undertake where the ROI is very difficult to ascertain. That’s not an excuse for not trying to calculate ROI. This is a blog about not making excuses. This is a blog that will (hopefully) make you think about ROI a bit differently. This is a blog that asks “where’s the ROI?” – knowing full well that the answer won’t always be an easy one.