Nottingham Castle: Marketing Performance for Board-Level Decision Making
Updated: Sep 12
Boards do not need more marketing metrics. They need a small number of measures that help them decide what to fund, change or stop.
Academic performance report + group proposal | Nottingham Castle case
The challenge
The assessment asked me to evaluate Nottingham Castle's performance and develop a measurement approach for a proposed exhibition. That meant connecting marketing activity to financial and visitor outcomes in language that would make sense beyond the marketing team.
My role
I produced the named individual performance assessment and contributed to a group presentation credited to Linh, Alex and Chima. This was an academic boardroom scenario, not an appointment to Nottingham Castle's board.
How I approached it
I reviewed historical financial information, visitor data, online reviews and marketing measures. Rather than presenting every available metric as equally important, I separated indicators that could support a decision from supporting context and considered the limitations of each measure.
The commercial question
A campaign can generate attention without generating enough paid attendance to justify the spend. Equally, a profitable event can still damage future value if visitor experience deteriorates. The framework therefore needed financial and customer measures to sit together.
What I proposed measuring
Return on marketing investment: is the incremental value worth the marketing spend?
Customer acquisition cost: what are we paying to bring in each additional visitor?
Break-even attendance: how many visitors are needed before the proposed activity covers its cost?
Conversion: are interested audiences actually becoming visitors?
Visitor satisfaction: are we creating an experience people would recommend and return to?
What this demonstrates
Commercial interpretation of marketing performance.
KPI selection for senior decision makers.
Ability to connect marketing activity with finance and customer experience.
Comfort explaining the limitation of a metric instead of treating dashboards as certainty.
Evidence from the project
The cover image comes from the Marketing for the Boardroom presentation. The supporting individual report and group proposal are retained in my evidence library.
Scope note
Historical financial movements in the case belong to the organisation's source data. They are not improvements delivered by me, and the proposed exhibition is not presented as an implemented commercial project.
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