There’s a significant disconnect in our industry between marketers and management. The marketing department is often criticised for taking a tactical approach to building sales without putting in place proper measures to ensure value and accountability. Management in turn is seen as too cost focused and criticised for taking too short-term a view of the role of marketing.

In a new report from the DMA, CIMA and the CIM, its author, Prof. Robert Shaw, goes some considerable way to improving relations between those who hold the purse strings and those tasked with marketing the business. ‘Return on Ideas’ is a bold attempt to “put the finance-marketing dialogue back on the rails”. It has developed the ‘Infinity model’ borne out of a study marketing best-practices from over 100 businesses.

The report finds that: “the best organisations have a positive creative tension between financial rigour and the marketing imagination”. It goes into detail to explain the factors which lead producing the greatest value from marketing spend:

• harnessing the marketing imagination to create value adding ideas
• predicting how much financial value these ideas will contribute
• delivering and demonstrating that value really was created
• establishing learning that will improve future ideas, predictions and results.

There’s a lot of thought-proving material here. Business success, as is rightly pointed out, happens when all the key players’ interests are effectively aligned to create value. This needs to happen in an environment where four key facets are allowed to develop and flourish: freedom, rigour, people and processes.

This report needs to be studied by those in senior marketing roles as well as board directors and those in finance. It advocates a well thought through and substantiated series of processes to maximise the return on ideas and to get better results from having finance and marketing working closely together.

Read Return on Ideas here

Digital guru, Don Tapscott, gave a lecture at the Annual IDM Lunch last month. He talked about how "differently the new net generation grew up, how differently it thinks and behaves – and how it has now arrived as the bright new talent in our businesses. In his presentation Don unveiled how the wikinomic generation will influence the nature of business, the marketplace and society as a whole."

A video of his presentation is now available here

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority have just awarded us a new project to communicate to teachers the process for testing school children at key stage 2. This is likely to be an difficult one, as our initial research among teachers showed strong antipathy towards the national curriculum tests. Our activity should go some way to establishing the paramaters and schedule for managing these tests.

Kirsty's, who's back from a stint on the client side, returns this week working on QCA, LSC and ConstructionSkills. Welcome back Kirsty!

I am working with my colleagues at Staffordshire University (where I lecture every so often on Advertising and Brand Management) on a paper to be submitted at a conference organised by the European Foundation for Commercial Communications Education (the educational arm of the European Association of Communications Agencies).

The event focuses on The Future of Commercial Communications Education in Europe, and our community marketing methodology will be presented as part of a section entitled ‘Business-Academia Partnerships – learning to deal with a chaotic media landscape and global consumers’. Watch this space to see how the great and the good in the academic world respond to this new approach to marketing.

Amanda McDonald