ERIC KINTZ is known for his Marketing Excellence Blog.

As Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP, he discusses key industry trends (such as the social web) and best practices in building the future Marketing function in the tech industry.




In a recent article he said, ""Marketing was once the growth engine of a company, creating great products and driving demand through mass advertising. But the dynamics shifted. Markets got commoditized. Traditional media modesl were disrupted. Marketing's ability to produce results began to decline and marketing became quickly perceived as nothing more than creative spending. CEOs turned to other functions such as supply chain, IT or sales to drive profitable growth and Marketing took a back seat in the business equation. I strongly believe that we are at a turning point where Marketing can re-conquer its role of growth architect, provided that it can prove its direct contribution to business results.

Many initiatives were already underway but we launched a major ROI initiative at HP 18months ago to bring together all these initiatives under one umbrella. ROI is for us less about a specific measurement or model and much more an operational discipline that ties our key marketing activities to business results.

Let me share some specific examples of the shifts we are undertaking:

-Customer loyalty: we have connected our net customer loyalty to our gross margin improvements. This allows us to understand the direct impact of customer loyalty improvements to HP's results and has greatly helped drive better experience.

- Brand performance: Brand is a significant contributor to shareholder value and price premiumness. We measure our brand value for our various business segments, benchmark it and compare it to our company value.

- Campaign performance: we are putting a lot of emphasis on deploying the right tools to trace our marketing campaigns, re-designing the lead management and campaign execution processes and standardizing metrics.This allows us to understand the direct contribution of marketing to the sales pipeline and to revenues.

- Portfolio ROMI: we have more recently started developing sophisticated marketing mix models that connect all marketing levers and investments to revenues and profits."


HP has several bloggers onstaff and there is lots of good industry reading there!