I get invitations to attend workshops all the time. Usually, I gloss over them. But I stopped on one the other day called “Marketing Metrics and Dashboards 2.0.” Not exactly a topic I’ve been dying to learn about. But it got me thinking: There must be a business opportunity for someone willing and able to show how best to integrate “triple bottom line” metrics into marketing.

Marketing dashboards have come into vogue in recent years, although they are not in broad use because they are complex and expensive to create and maintain. They seem to have found a niche primarily among large companies whose marketing departments are under scrutiny by CEOs and CFOs to demonstrate their expenditures are adding to the bottom line — the profit bottom line, that is. The marketing firm that is leading the workshop focuses on helping its clients “determine the financial return from marketing investments.” Their tagline is: “Measure What You Should, Not Just What You Can.” 

That begs the question: What “should” marketers be measuring? In recent years, marketers have been under increasing pressure to prove a positive financial impact from their programs. Dashboards are touted as one mechanism for doing so. I’m all for marketing carrying its weight financially. I also believe the possibilities, if not the responsibilities, of marketing go well beyond its impact on sales and profits. 

Companies committed to sustainable business practices recognize their success can’t be achieved simply by maximizing profits. They understand that profits gained at the expense of the environment or stakeholders, such as employees, suppliers and communities, are to be avoided and indeed are not a measurement of success at all. The triple-bottom-line approach of balancing profits with people and planet acts as a check on ill-gotten financial returns.

Which brings us back to marketing measurements. I would expect companies professing a commitment to the environment and the fair treatment of all stakeholders would also ensure this commitment is reflected in how they conduct and evaluate marketing. If marketing is held to a standard of financial ROI only — even as difficult as that is to measure — there will be no incentive for marketers to sweat the social and environmental impacts (positive or negative) of their work.

Marketers can perform a vital sustainability function by understanding, monitoring and influencing how their employers or clients create and manage their supply chains, conduct fair trade practices, manufacture their products, dispose of their waste, deliver their services and encourage recycling and reuse. This should be what it means to take responsibility for what you’re marketing.

Companies fixated on the financial bottom line are telling marketers to ignore this function and putting them in position to build customer demand for unsustainable products and services. But marketers are not simply victims here. They have a choice: keep playing the game, try changing the rules in favor of sustainability or look for a new employer or client.

A marketing program devoted to sustainability would adopt and track metrics that demonstrate how and how well marketing is contributing to the financial health of its employer or client, the well-being of people the company interacts with and the protection of the environment. I know this is asking a tremendous amount from marketers, not least of which is to define the non-financial metrics to be used.

At this point, I’d be happy getting more people in business to agree the value of marketing shouldn’t be measured in dollars and cents alone. Anybody building a triple-bottom-line dashboard?