The author argues that the three most common measurement “pathways” by marketers - customer metrics, Cash-flow Metrics, Brand Metrics - are pursued in a ad-hoc silos without an integrating framework or synthesis. 

The customer metrics pathway looks at how prospects become customers.

The cash-flow metrics pathway focuses on efficiency of marketing expenditures in achieving short-term returns.

The brand metrics pathway seeks to track the development of the longer-term impact of marketing through brand health.

 

"A marketing dashboard helps present the insights from all three of the pathways in a graphically related view that facilitates the human brain’s incredible power to find subtle contextual links. This is the point where the “art” and “science” of marketing need to blend."

 

Key takeaways from the book on What a Marketing Dashboard Does: 

There are five key benefits to employing a marketing dashboard:

1. A marketing dashboard aligns marketing objectives to the company’s financial objectives and corporate strategy through the selection of critical metrics and sharing of results.

2. The marketing dashboard not only creates organizational alignment within marketing, it clarifies the relationships between marketing and other corporate functional areas. 

3. The marketing dashboard establishes direct links between spending and profits. 

4. It creates a learning organization that makes decisions on hard facts supplemented with experiential intuition, rather than battles of intuition punctuated by a few dangerous facts.  That speeds decision making.

5. It creates transparency in marketing’s goals, operations, and performance, creating stronger alliances outside the department. 

This elevates marketing’s perceived accountability to earn the trust and confidence of the CEO, the CFO, the board, and other key decision makers throughout the company.