I am painfully aware that the regularity of my posts has decreased. But I am at least happy that there is a good reason for this.
Actually, there are four good reasons, each of which should allow me to contribute more value to the marketing finance community over the coming months. The four reasons all relate to the amount of time I have been spending over the past eight weeks trying to synthesize/formalize the ideas that we have developed at T2 over the past five years, and communicate them into an easily digestible format.
#1 – the Fall 2011 edition of the T2 Newsletter (currently at the printers) include a brief retrospective of our first 5 years in business, plus a summary of latest thinking on three major areas of research (intangible value; brand strategy and mergers; and the strategic use of social media). Do let me know if you want me to send you a physical/digital copy!
#2 – a series of short videos is in the works (filming took place in late October). Each provides the T2 PoV on a particular topic of interest to the marketing finance community (such a brand valuation or marketing accountability)
#3 – we are in the midst of filtering, clustering and interpreting the results of the three years of data we have collected on online discussions relating to the topic of the business impact of branding/marketing. As you might expect, this is a hugely noisy topic – but one that seems to bifurcate relatively cleanly between how marketing/branding creates value, and how marketing/branding should be measured
#4 – we are also expanding the scope of our mergers research to include cross-border mergers. Our goal is to see whether the evidence we found in domestic mergers for the importance of customer and employee engagement is replicated in cross-border transactions
As always, we would welcome suggestions on ways in which we can adapt our research to suit specific business challenges that any of you are encountering as you try to maximize the contribution of marketing to business value
