A Board-Level Diagnostic of Marketing's Contribution to Enterprise Performance
Assess how marketing contributes to revenue quality, margin performance, growth, and investment effectiveness.
The Strategic Marketing Value System™ evaluates how strategic alignment, decision discipline, and governance influence enterprise performance.
What The SMVS™ Diagnostic Reveals
Clearer Visibility of Marketing’s Contribution
Establishes an evidence-based view of how marketing contributes to revenue quality, margin performance, growth, and investment effectiveness across the organisation.
Stronger Strategic Alignment
Evaluates how enterprise priorities translate into marketing strategy, investment priorities, customer value creation, and go-to-market execution..
Greater Decision Discipline
Assesses how marketing decisions are structured, prioritised, measured, and governed across leadership, finance, and marketing functions.
Increased Confidence in Marketing Investment and Strategic Direction
Identifies where stronger alignment, governance, and performance oversight can improve confidence in marketing investment decisions, strategic prioritisation, revenue contribution, and growth predictability.
Designed for Enterprise Leadership
Boards • CEOs • Managing Directors • CFOs • CMOs • Senior Marketing Leaders
Typically where organisations are:
-
Seeking clearer visibility of marketing’s contribution to revenue, margin, and growth
-
Strengthening alignment between enterprise priorities, marketing strategy, and investment decisions
-
Improving confidence in how marketing investments are prioritised, evaluated, and governed
-
Pursuing growth with greater commercial consistency, scalability, and predictability
Led by Dr Karen Hanvik PhD, MBA, FCIM
30+ years across strategic marketing leadership, advising organisations on marketing growth, commercial alignment, and enterprise value creation across FTSE-listed, Fortune 100, growth-stage and international organisations.
How the SMVS™ Diagnostic Evaluates Marketing as an Enterprise System
The SMVS™ Diagnostic evaluates how marketing operates across the enterprise system, assessing how value, strategic judgement, and governance shape marketing's contribution to revenue, margin, growth and investment performance.
Evaluation Criteria Applied Across All Phases
Phase 1
Strategic Context
Business intent, board priorities, and commercial direction
Identifies:
-
How enterprise priorities translate into marketing direction
-
Whether strategic priorities are consistently understood across marketing
-
Where alignment weakens between leadership intent and market activity
Phase 2
Value System
How value is defined, prioritised, and aligned across marketing
Identifies:
-
How customer, market, portfolio, brand, capability, and financial drivers combine to shape priorities
-
Whether these drivers provide a consistent basis for investment and focus
-
Where value operates as a system, and where it fragments across teams and decisions
Phase 3
Market Execution
How strategic direction is translated into go-to-market execution
Identifies:
-
How direction is translated into go-to-market plans, investment, and activity
-
Whether execution follows a clear strategic logic, or diverges through local optimisation
-
Where alignment holds, and where activity moves away from intended outcomes
Phase 4
System Evaluation
Integration of insights into a system-level view of performance
Identifies:
-
Where definition, direction, and execution are consistently linked
-
Where gaps between layers create inefficiency or variability
-
How those gaps influence revenue quality, margin performance, and growth outcomes
Board-Level Diagnostic Outputs
The SMVS™ Diagnostic produces a structured, system-level evaluation of how marketing contributes to revenue, margin, growth, investment effectiveness, and enterprise value.
Integrated Marketing System View
A structured view of how value, strategic judgement, governance, and execution operate across marketing and enterprise leadership.
Strategic Priorities & Commercial Implications
Clear identification of where stronger alignment, governance, and decision discipline can improve:
-
revenue predictability
-
margin performance
-
investment effectiveness
-
growth scalability
Leadership Evaluation Framework
A board-level assessment of how marketing direction, investment, accountability, and performance are defined, prioritised, evaluated, and governed.
Engagement Overview
Duration
Typically 6-8 weeks
Leadership Involvement
Board representation (where relevant), CEO/Managing Director, marketing leadership, and finance leadership
Approach
Leadership interviews, selected marketing team input, and review of strategic, commercial, and marketing documentation
Board-Level Diagnostic Report
A board-level diagnostic report outlining:
-
Strategic findings
-
Commercial implications
-
Priority areas for intervention
Structured for Enterprise Scale and Complexity
The SMVS™ Diagnostic is designed as a focused, senior-level engagement that delivers rapid strategic visibility with minimal operational disruption through targeted leadership engagement, system-level analysis, and focused commercial assessment.
EXAMPLE DIAGNOSTIC OUTCOME
An international organisation operating across multiple markets was achieving customer growth and strong customer satisfaction outcomes, yet leadership had limited visibility of how marketing investment contributed to revenue quality, margin performance, long-term profitability, and scalable growth.
The diagnostic identified that marketing decisions were heavily weighted toward customer and activity measures, without a consistent enterprise-wide framework for evaluating strategic value, commercial trade-offs, investment risk, or long-term growth contribution.
As a result:
-
Investment was spread across initiatives with uneven commercial returns,
-
Margin pressure was increasing across parts of the portfolio,
-
Strategic trade-offs were not consistently evaluated,
-
Leadership had limited visibility of which customer segments, offers, and growth areas were generating the strongest long-term enterprise value.
The Diagnostic Recommended:
-
Establishing clearer commercial evaluation criteria across marketing investment decisions,
-
Introducing more structured assessment of strategic trade-offs, growth quality, and investment risk,
-
Strengthening visibility of contribution to revenue, margin, and long-term value creation,
-
Improving governance around prioritisation, investment accountability, and performance evaluation.
Strategic Implications
The diagnostic established a stronger basis for evaluating how marketing investment contributed to enterprise value, enabling leadership to improve prioritisation, strengthen margin discipline, and focus investment toward more commercially sustainable growth opportunities.
Assess Whether the SMVS™ Diagnostic is Right for Your Organisation
Schedule a Strategic Diagnostic Conversation
A focused discussion to explore your organisation’s context, priorities, and strategic challenges, and assess where the SMVS™ Diagnostic could strenghen commerical performance, strategic alignment, and investment visibility,
→ View availability and arrange a conversation with Dr Karen Hanvik
