The COIN Pathway at LMU was designed to align with cutting-edge industry practices and is grounded in the transformative principle of Marketing Accountability. This approach seeks to connect marketing actions directly to measurable financial outcomes - such as profitability and long-term organizational success. To achieve this, Marketing Accountability evaluates performance through key indicators from both the consumer perspective (including sales and brand loyalty) and the company perspective (such as customer acquisition costs and return on marketing investment, or ROMI).
The Importance of Financially Relevant Outcome Measures for Marketers
In the practice of Marketing Accountability, profitability-focused metrics stand in sharp contrast to so-called “vanity metrics.” These commonly used measures may appear impressive at first glance but offer little real insight into performance or decision-making effectiveness.
While vanity metrics are often easy to track and instinctively satisfying to report, they tend to lack relevance to core business objectives - particularly profitability and sustainable growth. As a result, they can lead organizations toward misguided strategies and poor decisions. Perhaps most concerning, vanity metrics create a false sense of understanding and control, giving marketing teams the illusion of success without truly measuring what matters.
Examples of vanity metrics include:
- Total Page Views
- Number of Clicks Generated or Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
- Number of Advertising Impressions
- Number of Social Media Followers
- Website Traffic
Too often, professionals in the marketing field have relied heavily on vanity metrics to justify increased budgets or to demonstrate the value of their departments. While these surface-level indicators may look impressive, they rarely provide the financial insight needed to prove marketing’s true impact.
Marketing Accountability seeks to change this. It represents a disciplined and data-driven effort to replace vanity metrics - and other forms of intuition-based marketing - with measurable, financially grounded strategies that clearly demonstrate marketing effectiveness.
Today, Marketing Accountability is championed by leading business publications such as The Financial Times and Forbes, and is increasingly recognized as the standard for modern organizations. Many Fortune 500 companies have already adopted this approach and are actively seeking professionals who possess the analytical expertise and strategic mindset it requires.
History of the COIN Pathway
Many of the foundational concepts behind the COIN Pathway were developed by David W. Stewart, Ph.D., one of the foremost thought leaders in marketing accountability. A longtime President’s Professor of Marketing at Loyola Marymount University and now emeritus, Stewart has played a pivotal role in shaping this field. He is the founding member and current chair of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), the leading organization advancing the principles of marketing accountability.
Professor Stewart has also authored several influential works, including "Financial Dimensions of Marketing Decisions" (Palgrave, 2019) and "Accountable Marketing: Linking Marketing Actions to Financial Performance" (Routledge, 2016).
Learn more about Professor Stewart here.
Working together, Professors David Stewart and Robert Winsor developed the COIN Pathway at LMU as one of the first university programs to teach students the principles and practices of marketing accountability. The overall goal of this program is to develop future leaders who can transform marketing’s role in corporate culture from a simple creative function that designs catchy slogans and trendy logos to a data-driven, results-focused process that can powerfully advance organizational goals.