The financial impact of marketing: Looking back and moving forward

Financial performance metrics are needed to gauge the impact of various marketing initiatives. We first highlight the importance of using financial performance metrics in deploying various marketing resources, along with challenges in doing so. We next discuss how recent geopolitical and macro-economic developments have raised the stakes, while advances in data collection and analytical capabilities may allow more timely and more actionable insights. We subsequently argue that the latter are no silver bullet, and may even detract from some broader challenges.