The biggest challenge with ROI isn’t a technical deficiency but confusion over how it is used. “To calculate ROI accurately, you need to be able to estimate the fraction of profits attributable to the investment,” write Neil T. Bendle and Charan K. Bagga. “In order to calculate ROI, there must be a return (a profit associated with the investment) and an investment. Unless you have both, you cannot calculate ROI.”

Should marketers subtract the cost of acquiring a customer before assessing that customer’s lifetime value (CLV)? Most of the time, no. “CLV is easier to understand, and in our view more useful, if marketers don’t subtract the acquisition cost from their calculation of CLV before reporting it,” write Neil T. Bendle and Charan K. Bagga. “Imagine that a company is selling an old machine. In this scenario, the company’s managers would expect to receive the machine’s current value, not the current value less what the company paid to buy the machine when new.”

Social media strategy shouldn’t be seen as the driver of value difference between a company’s fans and nonfans. Fans are often more favorable toward a brand to start with than nonfans are — indeed, this is probably what motivated them to affiliate in the first place. As well, social media spending should not be justified by an observed difference in customer value that may not have been caused by social media spending. Instead, to understand social media marketing’s impact, companies should run randomized experiments.

The net promoter score (NPS) has become one of the most widely used marketing metrics. Consumers answer a simple question (How likely is it that you would recommend X?) on a scale from 0 to 10. Customers who answer 9 or 10 are considered promoters; those who answer 6 or less are rated as detractors. The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. One of the strongest selling points of NPS is its simplicity. But the value of NPS may depend upon whether a manager sees it as a metric or as a system.

Market share is a hugely popular metric. But is it really useful? Companies with superior products tend to have high market share and high profitability because product superiority causes both. This means that the two metrics are correlated — but it does not necessarily mean that increasing market share will increase profits. Using market share as a metric of success simply because other companies do can be counterproductive.

Well-defined metrics are critical to effective marketing. However, despite their widely acknowledged importance, five of the best-known marketing metrics — market share, net promoter score, the value of a “like,” customer lifetime value, and ROI — are regularly misunderstood and misused. This confusion undermines the marketing discipline’s reputation for delivering results. The authors present Do’s and Don’ts for using these metrics and flow charts with detailed advice for developing each metric.

At the alcohol beverage company Constellation Brands, graphic presentations of data are making it easier for sales people to see how they’re performing. In an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, Joseph D. Bruhin, the company’s CIO, says that measuring marketing and sales efforts is a particular challenge in the alcohol industry — but one that his team has come up with a solution to. “Visibility of data is a critical piece,” he says. “We came up with a solution that’s really driven predominantly by information technology.”

If you think social media crises are uncommon things that happen only to other companies, you’re kidding yourself. A panel at the 2014 South by Southwest festival highlighted some of the most prominent recent fiascoes and offered a compelling view of just how commonplace these events have become. Five key takeaways from the panel offer suggestions for keeping a company from being the next entry on the steady parade of social media disasters.

Relationships between a company’s R&D and marketing departments aren’t always cordial — but they can be improved, according to a new article.

The marketing implications of litigation are often not factored into the decision to take legal action — but they should be.

In many organizations, the corporate marketing function has lost budget, head count, influence and confidence, resulting in strategic consequences that run deeper than many senior managers may realize. The question is not how to rebuild the marketing center, but how to disperse marketing competenceacross the organization.