Dashboards & Marketing: why, what, how and whichresearch is needed?Koen Pauwels, Tim Ambler, Bruce Clark, Pat LaPointe, David Reibstein, Bernd Skiera,Berend Wierenga, Thorsten Wiesel0
"Data is prolific but usually poorly digested, often irrelevant and some issues entirelylack the illumination of measurement." (Little 1970, p. B466)Still relevant decades later, Little’s (1970) quote accentuates the tension between theabundance of marketing data at our disposal and the lack of actionable insights thatderive from it. Recent years have seen the introduction of a “marketing dashboard” whichessentially brings the firm’s key marketing metrics into a single display (LaPointe 2005).The terminology is borrowed from a vehicle dashboard, which reports on a few metricsthe driver needs to know. As many as 40% of large US-UK companies report substantialefforts in this area (Clark, Abela and Ambler 2006, Reibstein Norton, Joshi and Farris.2005).This paper examines the reasons for this development, explains what dashboardsare, how to develop them, what drives their adoption and which academic research isneeded to fully exploit their potential.The latter is important because the development ofdashboards and their operation in practice are far from simple, but provides manyopportunities for marketing to exercise a stronger influence on top managementdecisions. In a broader sense, dashboard popularity reminds us of the need to betterunderstand how management copes with the increasing diversity and complexity ofmarket signals, performance evaluation, and planning.1. Why marketing dashboards?Marketing dashboards are a response to the increasing complexity and diversity of marketdata faced by senior management in the information age.At least five factors arefrequently mentioned by managers as driving the need for dashboards: (1) poororganization of the many pieces of potentially decision-relevant data, (2) managerial1
biases in information processing and decision-making, (3) the increasing demands formarketing accountability, (4) the dual objective of companies to grow the top-line whilekeeping down costs for a healthy bottom-line, (5) and the need for cross-departmentalintegration in performance reporting practices and for resource allocation.First, data overload is nowadays exacerbated by the fragmentation of media,multi-channel management and the proliferation of product lines and mass-customization(Hyde, Landry and Tipping 2004). Unisys, for instance, gathers tens of metrics(MarketingNPV 2004), generated by brand tracking, CRM programs, tradeshows, mediareports, satisfaction studies and Web logs. Firm alliances and mergers, internationalexpansion and the blurring of industry boundaries (e.g. cameras and cell phones) all worktogether to multiply the amount of (potentially) relevant data. At the same time though,human processing capacities remain limited (Simon 1957), and a substantial body ofresearch has demonstrated the presence and danger of managerial biases in informationprocessing and decision making (Cyert and March 1963, Wierenga and Van Bruggen
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