I would argue that there are three major stages in which marketing finds itself.

In the first early stage marketing is mostly ignorant of data, or measures things that are merely of marginal importance, like the number of responses to a prize win promotion or doing a postbuy analysis of a TV campaign to see if the GRP delivery matches the plan.

In the second medium stage marketing is not yet fully measured but there are several ongoing researches that help guide the marketing activities. These researches tell marketers about brand awareness, brand trial, brand usage, brand loyalty, rough socio-demographics. Marketers in this stage become aware of the fact that certain activities are measurable while others are not, or at least not yet.

In the third advanced stage marketing …primarily becomes aware of the fact that it needs to be tracked with sales data, and compare investments with revenues. Furthermore it needs to plan financial outcomes of strategies and campaigns upfront. It needs to have a data gathering strategy and organize data about customers in a usable database, to be able to turn more focus towards existing customers then constantly trying to persuade new strangers from the outside. It also needs to be able to evaluate non-measurable activities with proxy or indirect measurements. Finally, it needs to be able to asses a brand’s customer equity, and present it in a form resembling the financial statements such as balance sheet, income statement and cashflow statement.

I would also argue that marketing is mostly in the second stage today, but in many cases still not there completely. In rare cases marketing is already in the advanced stage, however in order to have it there completely some theoretical concepts and technological tools still need to be developed. One stellar example is Google’s Analytics package. When the logic of Google’s analysis will be fully ported to all marketing activities then we will be able to speak of a more general transition towards the third advanced stage of marketing.

I think that in Slovenia we still mostly see marketing of the first stage. There are very rare examples of third stage, a general interest in the second stage, but the majority is still at the starting line.

*izsek iz moje magistrske, zato je v angleščini