You wouldn’t walk into a room and not turn on the lights.  If you did, you wouldn’t know where you are in relation to everything that surrounds you.  Marketing without benchmarking is like venturing into a room with the lights off.

bench·mark [bench-mahrk] – noun: a standard of excellence, achievement, etc., against which similar things must be measured or judged

As marketers we have a plethora of buzzwords to measure our performance; words like Return on Investment (ROI) and metrics. But are you using these measures to evaluate success based on an arbitrary preset goal or are you using this information to become the standard of excellence?

Benchmarking is not just a metric. A metric is a comparative number, whereas a benchmark is a standard for the best. Benchmarking is a key to evaluating the performance of your efforts and processes.  Ask yourself; are your efforts the benchmark?  If your answer is NO; then whose are?

Don’t have a benchmarking procedure in place? Don’t know where to start? That’s our job. Stop back shortly for a best practices post.

This morning, our account executive Anna shared with us a piece she read from Advertising Age. The piece, entitled “Why Metrics are Killing Creativity,” really hit home to those of us in the ad world.

Don’t get us wrong; metrics definitely have a place of importance in the ad world. We are realistic, we know our clients have to measure success somehow, to see a return on their investment. But it becomes tough when we’re ONLY thinking about numbers. When metrics inhibit taking risks or executing strategic creative because we’re not considering anything but how many impressions, leads, clicks, conversions, etc. we’re going to get, we’ve become sorely misguided.

While numbers can’t be everything, neither can creativity: don’t do it for the sake of doing it. This is where strategy comes in. Having a cool ad is one thing. Having a fresh, big, new campaign that is targeted at your audience and will resonate with them on an emotional level is another. The latter, if done with strategic purpose, can (and will) deliver the numbers and metrics that we rely on. But to get there you have to put the metrics aside and step outside of the numbers box.

And as much as metrics has become the norm for measuring success, we cannot and must not deny the emotional aspect of branding. Emotional connections are what cause people to identify with brands. Its the break from the norm, the challenge of convention, that stays with consumers. Not the numbers.