Chris, I was taught that positioning your brand in the consumer’s mind closer to their ideal than competitors was the beginning and the end of marketing’s mission. In fact I got in on the ground floor of this movement. I was a doctoral fellow at the Marketing Science Institute in Philadelphia when Paul Green was working with Joe Kruskal at Bell Labs to translate his methods of multidimensional scaling into what would become one of the most powerful marketing technologies in the world. As a point of reference see Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling: A Numerical Method, Joseph B. Kruskal, Psychometrika, 29:2 (June 1964), pp. 115-129.

Since it was then a small organization I often found myself in a room at MSI with Paul and his colleagues as they hammered out their first applications of this psychological scaling technology to marketing.

What began as a break-through scientific paper in Psychometrika, years later took the marketing world by storm with the publication of Positioning: The Battle for your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Later on I spent ten years working as a change agent hired by the board of a European computer manufacturer. Our mission was to get marketing and sales to work together. I put nearly 2,000 middle and senior managers around the world through my two-and-one-half day programs, including four with the entire board of directors. You can get a sense of what we were up against if you read the section on “Surround IBM” in first two pages of Chapter 5: The Rule of Maximum Earnings.

That engagement was at once a huge corporate success and a personal disappointment. It was a huge corporate success because we changed the way marketing and sales worked together, which was in some degree responsible for turning the company around. It was a personal disappointment because the Finance Director really never believed our numbers. Why? We weren’t able to link market segment profit and loss statements the company’s stock price.

My argument was this. If we maximize profits at the segment level (there were hundreds of market segments in about eighty countries around the world), then we maximize the company’s earnings. Yes, but the question remained, how did that affect stock price?

In 1986 I resolved to find an answer this question. At the time the only thing I knew for sure was this: I had to understand stock valuation models and the financial accounting data on which they relied. The problem was I was trained in traditional marketing and I never took either a finance or an accounting course. I fact, I don’t even have an MBA! These were my blinders.

The bottom line? You can penetrate the mist of marketing financials without the technical training. All it takes is dedication and hard work. And as you said, it’s critical because … for the first time, we have a doorway into a financial system of measurements that allows us to start demonstrating the value-creating capability of marketing in terms that any CEO or CFO could appreciate.