The number of Facebook ‘likes’ a brand attracts has started to be used as a measure of success. Is this a temporary trend or is it a rather superficial measure at a time when there is a continued and increasing demand to demonstrate ROI?

On the one hand, I can see the benefit of a brand being able to demonstrate its popularity, that people are willing to declare their support publicly – assuming that they are genuine advocates, not just the result of an appeal to friends and work colleagues – as a means to encourage others to think positively about a particular brand, especially in markets which are in over supply and suffer from a lack of differentiation.

But does the fact that a couple of hundred people claim to ‘like’ your brand really make a difference, or is this another example of marketing people being seduced by this season’s ‘King’s new clothes’?

As I see it, there are three broad types of measurement – influencing, behavioural and the ultimate measure, financial.

Of course, all are interlinked.

Influencing measures: brand health, awareness and esteem measures sit at one end of the ‘influencing’ scale with more tactical things like coupons redeemed, samples distributed, web site hits and, I’d suggest, Facebook  ‘likes’ at the other end. All can be are interesting in that they can effect behaviour.

Behavioural measures: penetration, frequency & spend/weight of purchase – are helpful because they tell us how much sales revenue is generated – they also help us judge whether objectives are best addressed through exploiting headroom amongst existing buyers or by building penetration.

Financial measures: specifically market share (simply because share is a measure of relative performance against the market and competition) and profit are essential to understand. I’m not a great fan of just looking at sales revenue – a deep discount strategy might shift lots of volume and generate sales, which may be good to sustain distribution, protect factory output, or keep a competitor in its place – but it’s likely to be to the detriment of profitability.

The reticence of many companies to share profit margins with their marketing agencies – “it’s too commercially sensitive” – is perhaps a primary reason why agencies default to thinking about behavioural and influencing measures – they simply don’t have access to the financial information often enough.

I also wonder if marketing people use ‘confidentiality’ as a screen because they don’t evaluate the value of the campaigns they are proposing rigorously enough – but as long as they continue not to set commercial measures, they can expect finance directors to remain somewhat questioning over the return from marketing investment.

Whether you’re planning a campaign to increase sales of a leading FMCG brand on a national scale – or if you are a local café promoting ham and cheese baguettes, establish the right measures – those that influence behaviour, behaviour itself and, above all, the profit on incremental sales – but please don’t just leave it as ‘likes’.