Legendary management thinker and author Peter Drucker is often credited with saying: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” meaning you can’t know whether you are successful unless success is first defined and tracked. As logical as this lesson is, I am surprised that there are segments of the retailer/CPG relationship in which measurement is neither universally accepted nor applied.
Throughout the 1990s, for example, in the heydays of the dot-com boom, retailers and brands rushed to launch costly websites — and did so having no tools with which to track and analyze traffic or otherwise learn from their customers’ online behavior. In the early 2000s, Amazon introduced……