The importance of being able to demonstrate that the marketing communications budget is not being wasted is covered here, suggesting ways to measure effectiveness – ensuring marketing spend is contributing to the bottom line. One author, Roddy Mullin, has spent time with clients devising ways to measure the effectiveness of marketing communications because of the difficulty of relating it to ROI in the short term. The problem is that there is a time lapse, particularly with B2B campaigns, because of the human psyche. No buyer is going to switch 100 per cent to a new supplier until they are certain that delivery, price, product reliability and quality are assured. That takes time. The buyer’s job depends on the reassurance from successful trading. A small

test order is placed and if all is well then the following order sizes are increased. But there are ways of measuring – matching a new customer’s profile to existing good customers – which a finance director can undertake. So effectiveness can be measured in indirect ways.