“What gets measured gets managed.” – Peter Drucker
We’re pretty sure you’ll have seen it in an HBR article or 20. We had, so we decided to dig around in the State of Marketing data to have a look at what’s being measured by the almost 7,000 marketing leaders who responded.
We had a feeling we’d find a gap between marketers’ metrics and priorities – something we could point to as a reason only 15% of marketers are satisfied with their performance.
We dug around in the data – it was great, we’re data nerds through and through – and that ‘aha’ moment was on the horizon. Then we saw that Peter Drucker never said those words. According to the Drucker Institute, he wouldn’t even agree with how they’re commonly wielded. Gulp.
Reflecting on the use and misuse of the ‘Drucker quote’, Paul Zak, Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of The Moral Molecule, wrote: “not everything that goes into being effective can be captured by some kind of metric”.
So here’s the reason that while ANZ marketers’ top priority is innovation, it’s not seen in the top 5 metrics.
Still, let’s look at what marketers, globally, want to achieve, and how they’re measuring their progress towards some aspects of success. Metrics in marketing are always evolving and we can all learn more about them from our peers. Let’s look at where marketers are spending their budgets, because tactics too are always evolving.
If you want to, you can draw conclusions from the alignments and gaps between priorities and metrics. We’ll be over here wondering why we keep hearing Peter Drucker said that.
Thanks to Danny Buerkli, who published ‘“What gets measured gets managed” — It’s wrong and Drucker never said it’ on Medium, and Paul Zak, who wrote ‘Measurement Myopia’ for The Drucker Institute. 
