Marketing Audit

The marketing audit is to the marketing department what a financial audit is to the accounting department. A comprehensive review of a company's marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities, the marketing audit identifies operational strengths and weaknesses and recommends changes to the company's marketing plans and programs.

Here's our Top 10 list of the things a marketing audit should assess:

  1. Key factors that impacted the business for good or for bad during the past year.
    Including an evaluation of marketing "surprises"—the unanticipated competitive actions or changes in the marketing climate that affected the performance of the marketing programs.

  2. Customer satisfaction based on research among key target groups.

  3. Distributor, vendor, or intermediary satisfaction.

  4. Marketing knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction of all executives involved in the marketing function.

  5. The extent to which the marketing program was marketed internally and bought into by top management and non-marketing executives.

  6. The extent to which each decision in the marketing mix—e.g. targeting, positioning, pricing, advertising, etc.—was made correctly after evaluating many alternatives in terms of profit-related criteria.

  7. The performance of advertising, promotion, sales force, and marketing research programs with an emphasis on return-on-investment issues.

  8. Whether the marketing plan achieved its stated financial and non-financial goals and objectives.

  9. Which aspects of the plan that failed to meet objectives with specific recommendations for improving next year's performance.

  10. The current value of brand and customer equity for each brand in the product portfolio.

This list of criteria for auditing marketing programs is one of the many Copernican intellectual properties that differentiate our work.

Back to Copernican University