Forget the buzzwords, stop being obsessed with new media and focus on ROI – that is the message from the latest research by the Fournaise Marketing Group.

On releasing its ‘2013 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program’ where it measured the performance of marketers through performance-tracking data, the marketing group declared that more than 70% of marketers ‘got it wrong’ last year by failing to deliver the business results expected of them by management.

The research shows that in 2013: 

71% of marketers focused more of their campaigns/activities and budgets on new media platforms (particularly mobile, social & digital) to deliver their marketing messages and engage with their target audience – thinking that using new media channels is the best way to get their campaigns/activities to deliver results.

Fournaise also found that the same marketers also spent less time and efforts researching, developing and testing attractive and relevant ‘product customer value propositions (pCVPs)’ and/or “communication customer value propositions (cCVPs)’ for the same campaigns/activities.

Fournaise tracked that these CVP-neglecting who were relying heavily on new media performed three times lower on average (in terms of business results & ROI) than CVP-focused ROI Marketers – who also happened to use the same mobile, social and digital media in their message delivery channels mix.

70% of marketers surveyed believed marketing automation, ommichannel executions & big data management would be “game changers” for them in 2013 – and therefore spent more of their time, efforts (and money) on these areas last year, instead of on pCVP and/or cCVP crafting and optimisation.

The results of the research showed that 79% of these marketers admitted they still failed to unquestionably deliver (or prove their marketing spending unquestionably delivered) the level of business results & ROI expected of them by their management.

“The key 2013 Marketing Performance Lesson is simple: campaigns/activities without crafted, researched and optimised CVP (pCVP and/or cCVP) Architectures will under-perform, regardless of the Media channels they are deployed in. Unfortunately, we tracked that most CVPs were not audience-attractive and not audience-relevant enough last year” says Jerome Fontaine, global CEO & chief tracker at Fournaise.

“One of the diseases in the marketing industry is that marketers too often forget new media, marketing automation, omnichannel, big data and the likes are only tools used to best deliver, analyse and/or optimise the messages (CVPs). Those Marketers who made the Tools the core of their strategies got it wrong in 2013. In the tyre industry they say that Power is nothing without Control. In the marketing industry, form is nothing without the right content (CVPs),” Fontaine adds.

“So our #1 marketing performance boosting advice to marketers for 2014 is that if they want to deliver (real) business results, they should remember that everything must start with the right CVPs & the right CVP Architectures – without them, talking about customer experience or engagement (the 2014 buzzwords) is just a (big) waste of time” Fontaine concluded.