What a Marketing Growth Diagnostic Should Deliver

The word "audit" covers everything from a free website review offered by an agency hoping for the retainer to a board-level examination of why a marketing function is not producing growth. They are not the same product and they should not be bought the same way. Before commissioning one, it is worth being precise about what should come back.

The six deliverables

Growth constraint analysis. The primary reason growth is underperforming, with the evidence that distinguishes it from the symptoms around it. One constraint, named, not a list of twelve observations. If the report cannot say which single thing is costing the most, it has described the problem rather than diagnosed it.

Marketing effectiveness review. What each channel, campaign and agency contributes to the business against what it costs, including the upstream decisions that have no budget line. This is where most audits stop, and it is the second deliverable, not the first.

Team capability assessment. Whether the team has the skills, roles, decision rights and capacity the plan requires. Assessed against what this business needs, not against a generic marketing competency list.

Commercial funnel analysis. The path from awareness to enquiry to qualification to revenue, adapted to the business model, with the leak located and its cost stated in rupees. A diagnosis that cannot price the constraint cannot prioritise the fix.

Stop, fix, build. Which activities should stop, which need repair, and which capabilities are worth building. In that order, because stopping is free and building is not.

The 90-day plan. Named owners, baseline metrics, targets, review cadence and expected impact. Written so the internal team can run it without the diagnostician in the room.

The one condition

Independence. The diagnostician should have no commercial interest in what the diagnosis recommends. An agency auditing a function it would like to run, a media partner reviewing a media plan, a consultancy whose retainer depends on finding something large: each will produce a diagnosis shaped by its incentive, and the buyer will not be able to tell which parts.

Bombay Breed does not sell media, does not run marketing functions on retainer and does not execute what it diagnoses. That is a commercial constraint we chose, because the diagnosis is the product and it is only worth something if it is clean.

Six questions to ask before signing

• Have you diagnosed an existing in-house team without taking over its execution?
• Will you interview the business head, sales leadership and individual team members, and look at live work and real numbers?
• Will you distinguish a strategy problem from a capability problem from an execution problem?
• Will you put a rupee figure on each constraint?
• Will you provide the written diagnosis and plan even if we do not commission the fix?
• What do you sell that the diagnosis could recommend?

The Constraint to Capability Growth System opens with exactly this diagnosis and delivers all six documents in the first three weeks of the 90 days. The entry point is a paid thirty-minute Creative Growth Diagnostic with Theresa Ronnie, which locates the constraint and prices it before any engagement is scoped.