Defining "Good" in a World of Marketing Chaos
I’ve spent my entire career building and nurturing brands, and since 2018, I’ve done that specifically for Private Equity businesses. The most frustrating part? The lack of a universally acknowledged definition of what "good" actually looks like for marketing. No one could tell me what the benchmark was, which made it impossible to have a sensible conversation with management teams about how to improve.
I once interviewed a partner at a major US firm who admitted they don’t even consider marketing during acquisitions because they’ve never found a way to quantify it. For an industry obsessed with numbers, that is a curious statement, especially when portfolio companies spend up to 30% of their OPEX on marketing.
We built our diagnostic tool, Marketing System Efficiency (MSE), to solve this. It allows PE owners to look at the latent value in a target company, quantify it, and build a concrete plan to unlock it. It’s about taking the mystery out of the black box and replacing it with accountability.
The technology underpinning MSE is a result of hard-won experience. We didn't just build this in a vacuum; we started with the intellectual property from 40 PE assignments over eight years and tested it against more than 1,000 companies.
When you look at the sheer volume of data sources and algorithms we use to get to the right number, it’s a bewildering combination. This is where the Large Language Models (LLMs) come in. An LLM can do the work of millions of humans in a heartbeat.
But a word of caution: we aren't just throwing stuff into ChatGPT like some of the ‘game changers’ you may see. MSE is a specialized, rigorous diagnostic tool built on professional marketing expertise. It takes a complex world of billions of data points and distils them into a simple, actionable RAG table: Red, Amber, Green. It distils billions of data points into a visual readout of your marketing health showing you exactly how successful your brand is, and where it’s falling short.
Will Harris – Founder, Bridge F61
