I feel both exhausted and encouraged from this week’s Conference Board conference on Measuring Marketing Effectiveness. Exhausted because the data shows that despite so much talk for so many years about the need for measures and ROI , we marketers have made very little progress over the past 10 years.

A 2007 ANA study found that just 11 percent surveyed said they are very satisfied or satisfied with their ability to determine marketing ROI. A soon-to-be released Conference Board study found that none of the companies surveyed feel as though they’ve “arrived” at figuring out a good way to measure marketing.

Exhausting, too, because creating approaches that provide insights and guide planning - vs. simply measuring tactics — is hard, scientific work. Companies with successful measurement systems, like Eli Lilly, Unilever, MetLife, said it takes at least three to four years to begin making real progress.

The only measure that may matter?

What was encouraging, however, is that marketing measurement innovators believe one approach is particularly valuable: measuring customer preference or perceived value, which are leading indicators of revenue, profits, and cash flow. (In other words, a measure that helps you manage and satisfy the CEO and CFO AND see glean insights to help manage vs. simply measure marketing.)

Don Sexton, professor of marketing at Columbia University believes that this is the most effective measure, yet is missing from nearly every list of marketing measures. (FYI: Don is releasing a book on the topic this fall.)

Other takeaways:

Relationship preference matters as much as product preference

Mark Kershisnik of Eli Lilly believes (has has the data to back it up) that equity can provide a measurement of both investment and performance, and the way to measure equity is by assessing product brand preference AND relationship preference.

I found this especially interesting as so many marketers focus exclusively on product preference, yet customers make decisions, particularly in the B2B landscape, on relationship factors like trust, likability, innovation.

Most common measures are meaningless: lagging indicators vs. leading indicators

Most of the common marketing metrics are, well, useless. Awareness, mind share, perception, recognition, recall, share of market, loyalty, purchase intention, cost per click, etc. may be easy to measure, but they don’t connect to business value nor do they provide indicators of what to do differently to improve performance. They are lagging indicators measuring past performance rather than leading indicators that can help diagnose where to improve brand and relationship preferences and how to monitor progress of achieving marketing objectives.

Focus on just a few things

Many marketers try to measure too many things - 30 or 40 factors. It’s impossible to properly assess that many factors - or have the resources to work on improving that many factors. Many of the speakers recommended focusing on just 3 - 4 product preference factors and 1 -2 relationship preference factors.

Getting on the same page crucial to success

All of those firms with successful measurement strategies have educated their entire leadership team so that everyone has a shared definition of marketing, marketing value, measures and metrics.

The CFO’s mantra

Kamal Sen, director of business analytics and strategic planning for Unilever in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Turkey, offered what the CFO really cares about

• Sales is vanity.
• Profits are sanity.
• Cash is reality.