I have left hard measures until now. Of which the usual culprit is return on investment. Accountants also like net present value which allows them to see if they could have done something more useful with the money while you were using it.  The danger about ROI and financial measures is that as long as you get your money back the assumption is that somehow that is the end of the matter, you spend money to gain money. Marketing most of the time is creating value that is a good deal more useful than immediate payback. So ROI type measures consistenly underestimate the value. And if allowed as the only or primary measure will nudge you to do things which are less risky and more immediate. In other words to have a corrosive effect. So I would urge you to look at some of the meaures with which I began earlier this week.

So to summarise what we have been looking at this week if you want to create motivation then start with measures don't leave it until someone requires you to produce a business case. That way you can choose measures which are relevant to the project and which will motivate you and those you work with to do their best. And don't forget personal measures as well. If you don't build a culture of measurement which makes a difference to you personally then you will miss a valuable source of motivation.

The soft measures beloved of advertising agencies are the self reported measures of brand and advertising recall, and claimed behaviour and attitude changes. They are used so much we can't avlide considering them. And they may be used because there aren't a lot of other ways of measuring advertising short of sales - which is rarely a useful measure for advertising.

In recent years there has been more of a focus on an advocacy ladder. In other words how many non users have you got, how many are aware of your product, how many would consider buying it and so on right through to repeat buyers and advocates. By measuring the number in each group and trying to migrate people upt through the levels you have a better impression of the impact of communications.

These are stil soft measures because they depend on self reporting. In other words the person who you are interviewing talking about what they remember. And people are notoriously bad at reporting their own behaviour and attitutes reliably and consistently.  So use with care!

The other major weakness for setting up these kinds of measures to get an impression about the impact of communications is that it is difficult to isolate the effect of a particular advertising campaign. The reason why they are so enthusiastic may be because they use the product a lot not because they have been exposed to a lot of communication material. They won't be able to tell you this! So act with caution. I gave you a list of other kinds of measures back in Waggle 13 so you can see there are plenty to consider as alternatives.

The last soft measure is the netpromoter score - a measure invented by Reicheld - to measure the proportion of people who will recommend your product. If this increases after what ever you are planning then that can often be taken as a useful measure. Even if it is difficult to attribute this increase exclusively to what it was that you did.

This concludes my list of softer measures. I am not negative about them. But I am realistic about how much they can be taken as a measure of communications activity. Famous advertising doesn't in itself drive sales. So it may be that you might do better finding more behavioural type scales instead of measuring that people remember famous campaigns.

It may surprise you that the less certain you are about what you are measuring the more I would encourage you to try to measure what ever it is you're not sure about. It seems counter intuitive but the trouble with not being certain is making no measures at all. Then I can guarantee you won't be surprised by what happens. Because you had no expectations in the first place.You need to put a finger in the air. You need to test the water.

The reason for making an assumption or two and attaching a measure or two to them is that reality will be different. But your initial measures because they won't work the way you expected will shape your understanding of what happens. You will actually learn something.

Making predictions and measures and having to justify them at least to yourself is a great way to pull out the assumptions you are working with which no one will ever challenge because you have never articulated them. Set up a measure or two and you will be challenged and you will have to bring out your assumptions to defend yourself. That's why this is so valuable as an exercise. It forces you to make explicit what is implicit and inarticulate. That is hugely valuable. the more you do it the more likely you are to be trading on useful experiences - predictions which start to be borne out by the facts because you learned from experience. So don't be afraid to set a measure and justify your choice. You'll be doing everyone a favour. And you will be taking the first step towards getting valuable experience. 

We're looking at the kinds of measures that can be set right at the start of a project when we want to give some parameters by which success might be measured. Yesterday we looked at personal measures. Now to turn to harder measures - here's a list. We can start with the 'hardest' of measures the financials expressed as sales and gross margin, closely followed by product sales. We can turn to customer based measures such as transaction value, year to date or moving annual total customer spend, lifetime value. Or customer's share of basket - in other words are they buying more of our products than those of our competitors. We can look at frequency of purchase. We can look at new customers, incremental expenditure. We can look at loyalty and loss of business or customers through attrition. Closer in we can look at sales through different distribution channels - and the availability of the product. We'll come back to the softer brand and communication measures tomorrow.

The point I am making is that this is a huge list of measures. ROI does not begin to cover all of the things you could measure. It is useful in showing how you multiplied your investment but the guarantee of future sales comes from other factors entirely. Here's a chart I used a very long time ago to convince a hardbitten M&S director that he had a major sales opportunity. At that time they measured wine sales by total value. And boasted they killed products in minutes based on the rate of sale. Using observation (on instore security cameras) I was able to find that it was taking up to 15 minutes to buy a single bottle of wine. And using TGI that customers were only buying a quarter of their wine there. It only needs a calculator to demonstrate the impact of the business if customers bought half their wine at M&S.  These measures were simple to obtain but invisible to the cash till.

The measures you select will give the task you set yourselves a particular character. That's why it is so important that you agree up front what you are trying to do and what change you are bringing about. Using a long candidate list of measures also helps to address the kind of project manager or client who wants to win on every single kind of measure. It can't be done - so we have to prioritise the most important measures and may have to leave out some of the others.

For the client who says there is no budget to research anything so we have to stick to financial measures I would still say that there should be a discussion about what constitues success. Otherwise you won't know what you are setting out to do. So agree measures anyway - it makes it easier to then persuade someone to spend some money to see what actually happened.

Measure at the start. Then here's the next counterintuitive thing. Measure something personal that has an impact on you. Another reason we don't like measuring things is that we are supposed to measure big important things. Like money. And as we shall see one of the problems with ROI is that it is a measure no one really relates to.  Hardly anyone gets out of bed and says I must get down to the office to improve the ROI by 10 points any more than they go to the office to raise the share price. Because it isn't in their job description.

Whenever I finish a piece of training these are the questions that I ask people to think about What I'm going to stop doing. Something big I'm going to do differently. Something simple I'm going to change. And the final key question. How will I know when its working?

If I work with that group again and have the time to set up a preliminary exercise then I will ask them to bring in photos or images of the changes that took place following the actions they have taken. This is a powerful way to reinforce change and to make sure that people have indeed made changes or noticed changes in their working practices. One time I did it I got photos of PR spreads that would never have happened without the decisions taken in the previous workshop, stock ordering systems which saved hours of waiting on the phone, and empty shelves as products started to fly off them.

This may seem far too local for those who want to set up big measures. But teams can will progress faster if team members understand what's in it for them and whether it is working or not. There is no point committing to big goals if the team members can't see how they personall will contribute and progress toward the goal. There do of course have to be bigger goals and deadlines but the personal measures are powerful because they are set by the individual who is best placed and motivated to achieve them.

This week we are going to look at Motivation the 2nd of our 3 areas for the Waggledancer. Just ro remind you the motivation is about how you persuade others to be enthusiastic about whatever it is you have found. Instinctively we would rather that they were enthusiastic about us. Often they may not be enthusiastic about either us or whatever we have found. And we don't want them to lock into us becuase that means they will come to us instead of going off to retrieve the sweet stuff themselves. We don't want a stream of people giving us more to do and we don't have the capacity for going and getting more ourselves. We want them to go and get it. Hence the motivation.

Motivation that it is indeed worth getting. And will make a difference to the work they are doing. Motivation that they will pass on the information to others - so others will go looking as well. You may be getting bemused about what 'it' is. Well it could be an insight into the customer. It could be a strategy - a way of engaging with customers. But we want them to own it and not be doing us a favour.

The first aspect of motivation I am going to start off with is measurement. Which probably surprises you. Usually we don't think about measurement until we get to the end of a project and need some justification for raising a budget for the next project. Or we may be hoping that nobody remembers to ask so we get away without measuring at all. Trouble with these approaches is that measurement is for someone else (often in finance) - and that we don't expect it to tell us anything. We also have a problem with expecting that any set of measures needs to be 100% accurate - where don't have enough information or we aren't sure what to measure we back away. 

Actually you can measure just about anything. And you can measure in any way you like. If you measure up front them it shapes how you go about a task - the measurement helps to create the motivation. The other great thing about measuring up frount is that it is speculative - you are guesssing what is going to happen. When you actually get around to doing something then it is likely to be different. By comparing what really happened with what you expected to happen you learn.  And you are in a position to optimise. If you don't know how you think you will do then how do you know if you can do any better?

If the finance people aren't going to ask about their ROI until itsnearly all over then by starting so early you have carte blanche to set whatever measures you like.  You might want to measure how much time or work or money is likely to be saved by using this insight or by following this strategy. If it isn't going to make any difference then why bother doing it? So start with measures - in this coming week we are going to look at some of the things you can measure.

Many years ago I read Cliff Stoll's book the Cuckoo's egg where he patiently tracked down a hacker. This is a welcome re-discovery. I call him a waggledancer because he is such a compelling speaker - using distraction and eccentricity to keep you hooked. You honestly don't know where he's going but you can't leave till you find out. And his final point makes sense in the light of the journey he has taken you on. I'd love to do a presentation based on what I've written on my hand but having seen him do it I don't think I would dare. This is waggledancing - making you want to learn.

A little light relief to start the week - Pee Wee Herman dances his way out of trouble after wrecking the Harleys of a biker gang. What would you say is the equivalent of the tequila moment?

 Well I guess I had one of these on a briefing for Honda motorbikes no less as a junior planner. The client mandatories for no less than 7 ad briefs were: the bike has to be shot side on. The headline was to be white out of red. Everything else was room for creative input. It wasn't the easiest briefing.  At the end of it the team looked at me hopelessly - is there anything else you can tell us about the bikes or those that ride them? (there wasn't). So I asked them Have you ever seen a black motorbike rider (this was a long time ago!) No they said - why is that? So we spent a few minutes talking about Easy Rider and On the Waterfront versus Shaft movies and how riding bikes had a totally different association for adolesent white boys. It didin't change the briefs by one iota but it did change how they felt about bikes. Which at the time was what they needed.

If you want to get the best reception for an idea you are briefing - then find a neutral place to do it. Far too many briefings happen in the territory of the person doing the briefing or the territory of the person being briefed. This doesn't make for a free exchange of ideas - you're either telling someone what to do - on your territory or you go on their territory to ask them a favour. Typically your own territory will contain objects which symbolise your power and your achievements. Theirs will do likewise. The big danger is that you get more of the same. Soo go somewhere neutral. It could be a meeting room but most meeting rooms are unbelievably bland - designed to make statements about those whose meeting it is and those who they want to impress - but they are neutral.

Much better is to go somewhere different or surprising where those meeting won't feel too uncomfortable but can't stay thinking in a rut. My favourite briefing place is an icecream parlour. I stole this idea from Richard Gilmore of Insight International who researched doctors ( a notoriously difficult group to get to lighten up in research) by taking the chairs out of the room so they had to sit on the floo. And handing out small pots of icecream but providing no spoons so they had to use their fingers. You can't maintain dignityand control in that sort of situation. You could choose a museum or an art gallery. Once you stop thinking it has to be in their office or yours the floodgates are open.

One other thing. A useful metric for you. Watch how the creatives leave. If they walk slowly and turn more than once then you haven't delivered the goods. They stll have more questions. But if they walk out quickly it is VERY good news because it means that ideas have started to flow and they don't want to discuss them in front of you.