A central problem in business today is that marketing lacks the kind of accountability and metrics common to the rest of the corporation. While manufacturing and service organizations can quantify their costs down to a fraction of a penny and project their return on investments, marketing remains a corporate “dark science,” in which marketing practitioners can generate desirable results, but cannot tell you how they achieved them.

The problem of measuring marketing’s effectiveness and efficiency is profound: unlike other segments of the corporation, in which the language is unequivocally tied to the language of finance, marketing has no common units of measurement. It is not that marketing professionals cannot agree on whether to use yards or meters; they cannot agree on whether they are trying to measure volume, distance, or some other third- or fourth-dimensional characteristic. 2006