The Marketing Accountability Imperative: A Roadmap to More Effective Marketing Spending.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

The Marketing Accountability Imperative: A Roadmap to More Effective Marketing Spending. By Michael Dunn and Chris Halsall. Jossey-Bass, 454 pages. $39.95.

It's practically a default setting in the corporate world that CFOs and CEOs question the value of their marketing efforts. There's a resultant focus on accountability, which the authors find is too often viewed as simply assessing the return on investment of marketing dollars.

Indeed, in this lengthy and idea-crammed book, Dunn--the CEO of global consultancy Prophet--and company colleague Halsall make a case for a much more holistic view of marketing decisions. They extend the classic "marketing budget," made up largely of advertising and promotions, to include public relations, Web efforts, customer-service spending and the resources given to relationship managers and sales incentives.

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All of these investments take time to build, and put the chief marketing officer (CMO) under the gun. Since solid...