Marketing assessments provide valuable benchmarks.  Here’s why you should conduct assessments and which ones are worth doing.
Companies are often in such a time crunch that they’re in a constant state of activity. They’re exerting so much energy they are often more in a state of motion than movement. How do you know whether what you’re doing is working and what needs to change? Conduct an assessment. It doesn’t have to be long, it just needs to be thorough and done properly.

The Purpose of Assessments

There are three primary reasons to invest in assessments:

1. To understand what is working.
2. To identify opportunities for improvement.
3. To define a baseline for future benchmarking activities.

From this perspective it seems rather clear why a company would conduct as assessment. If by conducting an assessment you gain information about how well or poorly a business component is working, you will have a better chance at fixing it.

It’s hard to fix something you don’t know isn’t working. It’s a bit like cholesterol, unless you test it, chances are you won’t know whether it’s high or not. And without this information, you won’t know whether you need to make any adjustments to your lifestyle. Once you have the information, you can then decide whether you need to address something and if so, decide a course of action.

Leaving high cholesterol unattended can lead to health issues that put you at greater risk. Similarly, when an assessment reveals that a component is performing poorly or is at risk, if it left unaddressed other systems may become negatively affected.  Taking the necessary corrective steps allows your company to keep an asset from becoming a liability.

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Good Assessments Identify Causes

The process of a good assessment should help identify the cause impacting the performance. If you’re a company committed to continuous improvement, then assessments must be a part of your company’s culture. These companies use the assessment process not only to identify areas of risk, they also use it to discover strengths and opportunities that can be more widely exploited.

Assessments can help a company or business line discover opportunities by identifying what their customers value and what they need for success, leading the business to know what to focus on and prioritize. By understanding customer needs and wants, the company can then develop product and service standards that are driven by the market. In other words, companies produce the value their customers want as opposed to what they think their customers want. Knowing what the customer needs and wants is an integral part of creating the “right value,” even when using our “non-customer” insights.

Properly run assessments determine an asset’s “real” condition and provide insight as to how the company can successfully improve its value position. In addition, a good assessment will help uncover the relationships between particular function such as sales, marketing, support, or product development.

Focus on Three Key Areas

Assessments take time, talent, and of course money.  These don’t exists in large amounts for many companies.  It may not be possible to perform all the assessment your want whenever you want. Therefore focus your assessments on three key areas:

1. your market
2. your competition
3. your brand

The bottom line: Assessments provide the information we need to prove that strategies are working as intended and providing the impact expected by both our customers and our company. They provide a comparison baseline for future performance. By knowing where we are compared to where we’ve been, using the same terms and criteria, you have a better chance of getting where we should go and becoming more focused. In the end you may still be just as busy, but with more purpose.

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