This paper explains two measures, perceived value and Customer Value-Added (CVA^®), that can provide managers with steering control—providing them with knowledge of the likely financial results of their actions before they are taken. Both measures are based on a solid conceptual foundation and both have proved to work in practice. Application of these measures gives managers steering control for both products and services, in both industrial and consumer markets. These metrics can be employed to evaluate the entire range of marketing actions.

Why Is It Worth to Know the Future?
Most of the metrics employed to measure marketing return focus on past performance. Current sales, market share, net profit, and contribution show the results of past actions. Certainly, it is important to know past performance to benchmark and perform diagnoses. However, managers should want metrics that predict the financial results of marketing actions before decisions are made and before actions are implemented. Such metrics would allow managers to predict the future and provide them with steering control.

How valuable to managers would be accurate forecasts of the financial consequences from any marketing action? Over the past years, the marketing press has published numerous articles describing the failures of companies regarding their advertising messages, their media choices, their logos, their product features, their brand attributes.

Effective Executive Magazine, Measure marketing, Past performance, Predict the financial results, Marketing actions, Financial consequences.