Leonardo ENERGY’s Impact

In physics the Heisenberg uncertainty principle rules. It states that it is impossible to measure the impulse of a particle if you know its exact place, and vice versa.
In marketing communication, there is also an uncertainty principle: the maximum return of your communication action is impossible to measure. Because once you make the return measurable, it loses value.

Perhaps this is not quite so much the case if your market enables a streamlined communication. If you’re selling diapers, you can measure your market share before and after your communication action, and this will allow you to make a fairly good estimate of your return.

But if a chaotic communication model is to be preferred (see my previous post), things aren’t that easy. The paradox is that the more you want to make the return measurable, the more you will have to streamline your communication and the less effective your communication will be.

What Leonardo Energy can measure are click-rates. But remember: the target audience is not at all united in what they need. So how do you know, if a person clicked on a message, to which degree this message was also useful to him? Moreover, LE is not the only one communicating on this subject. If a surfer’s general knowledge on the subject increased, what was LE’s share in making this happen?

But wait, it gets even more complicated, because the ultimate goal is not disseminating knowledge but increasing the sales of copper. How will you measure whether or not additional knowledge on the part of some individual on High Efficient Motor Systems (HEMs) will actually result in the action of buying HEMs? Trying to estimate the link between click rates and copper sales is absurd. Some things in business are simply not measurable. Either you believe that it works, or you don’t.

Let me give an extreme, theoretical example on how a more streamlined communication could make it easier to calculate the return. LE could organize a seminar on HEMs dedicated to, for instance, maintenance managers of medium sized food processing plants in Flanders (a target audience). You offer the seminar for free, on the condition that participants fill in a questionnaire before and after the seminar, to check what they learned, and then they also have to fill in a questionnaire one year later about their purchasing actions. In this way you get to know how many participants a) learned about HEMs during the seminar and b) actually purchased them in the following year. That will allow you to calculate your return fairly accurately. However I am willing to bet that this return will be negative.

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