Identifying individual circumstances

Before a manager can constructively measure the marketing effort (or any component part of it), he must identify the conditions under which his particular company is operating. While many of these conditions will be internal and subject to some control on the part of management, others are external circumstances over which the individual company management or marketing director may have little or no control. Nevertheless, these circumstances affect his performance and that of the men under him.
Marketing management needs to examine and measure those factors, internal and external, which affect performance. Sometimes outside forces may affect the performance of one company But not that of a competing company. For example, General Electric Company and Sears, Roebuck and Co. are competitors in the sale of electrical appliances. But General Electric sells through thousands of independent retail merchants. Sears sells only through its own controlled retail outlets whose operating policies, prices and methods are standardized. General Electric has no such control over its independent retailers, who sell what they want, at whatever price they want. It is thus obvious that the conditions at the point of sale vary for the two companies.
Thus, even though we may critically examine a company's total performance, we cannot disregard the reasons why conditions are what they are. These conditions may, and often are, quite outside of the area of control of the individual performer.
Everything that has been said emphasizes the need for fact finding in any attempt to measure the marketing performance of a company. It is at this stage that the marketing manager realizes the value of marketing research, and of the growing importance of this tool of management, not only to know what his company is doing, but to determine how it can do the job better.
And here we can see the importance of the various factors discussed under fact finding and marketing research, such as forecasting on the basis of facts, getting factual information as to what the market can absorb and at what price, determining the share of the market and calculating manpower needs.
We cannot expect to measure the effectiveness of the performance of marketing people unless we know, as accurately as it is possible to know, what can be done, where, and under what circumstances. It is only then that we can plan to do our share of the business, measure and control the total effort aimed at doing this, and adopt additional goals, changes, improvements, and tactics to finish the job.