Marketing Due Diligence

Section 1

Term being defined

Marketing Due Diligence.

The structural discipline of validating marketing-spend integrity before commitment of capital, operationalised through RAMMP's Pre-Spend Diagnostic.

Section 2 · Definition

Marketing Due Diligence is the structural discipline of validating marketing-spend integrity before commitment of capital — applying RAMMP's Pre-Spend Diagnostic to produce a Brand Trust Score, a Revenue Feasibility Index, and a STOP / KEEP / FIX / PROVE verdict per decision, with the resulting record documented for board, audit-committee, or credit-officer review.

Section 3

Purpose

Marketing Due Diligence exists because marketing is typically the only major budget line in an organisation funded without a formal validation discipline.

Three structural arguments motivate the term:

• Finance is audited. Legal is reviewed. Cyber is tested. Marketing has historically been funded on belief — and that gap is the structural reason marketing-spend produces unpredictable returns.
• "Due diligence" is a borrowed term from finance and legal — domains where decisions of similar magnitude already carry validation discipline. Applying the same structural language to marketing makes the spend defensible on terms board members and credit officers already understand.
• The discipline produces an audit trail — a per-decision record that survives the next economic cycle, the next personnel change, and the next regulatory review.

Marketing Due Diligence is the governance discipline; Pre-Spend Diagnostic is the practical method by which the discipline is performed.

Section 4

Scope

This standard applies to:

• Every marketing-spend decision above a materiality threshold defined by the operating business (typical floor: any campaign budget greater than $5,000 or representing more than 5% of the marketing line).
• Every board pack or audit-committee report that includes a marketing-spend line — Marketing Due Diligence is the documentation discipline that backs the line.
• Every credit-assessment workflow where a borrower's marketing-spend integrity is part of the credit thesis — see /for-lenders.

This standard does not apply to:

• Operational marketing tasks below the materiality threshold — daily content publishing, routine ad-account maintenance, brand-asset updates, and similar work.
• Retrospective marketing audits — Marketing Due Diligence is, by definition, pre-spend. Retrospective audits use different disciplines (marketing-mix modelling, attribution analysis, channel-performance review).

Section 5

Components

Marketing Due Diligence comprises five documentation phases that map to the Pre-Spend Diagnostic's procedural phases:

1. Decision identification — the specific marketing decision being evaluated · the materiality threshold it crosses · the revenue projection (if any) attached.
2. Diagnostic execution — application of the Pre-Spend Diagnostic per the RAMMP Diagnostic Protocol · production of the Brand Trust Score and Revenue Feasibility Index.
3. Verdict resolution — translation of the diagnostic outputs into a STOP / KEEP / FIX / PROVE verdict per decision.
4. Record documentation — timestamped, versioned record of the decision, the diagnostic, the verdict, and the rationale · exportable to board, audit-committee, or credit-monitoring systems.
5. Re-measurement scheduling — the date at which the decision will be re-evaluated against a fresh diagnostic.

Phases 1, 3, and 4 are mandatory in every Marketing Due Diligence record. Phases 2 and 5 are mandatory when the diagnostic baseline is being established or re-measured.

Section 6

Outputs

Marketing Due Diligence produces:

• A canonical per-decision record — versioned, timestamped, exportable.
• A board-ready disposition (STOP · KEEP · FIX · PROVE) with the underlying Brand Trust Score and Revenue Feasibility Index attached.
• An audit trail that survives personnel changes, organisational restructures, and regulatory reviews.
• A re-measurement schedule that locks the next decision point.

The output of Marketing Due Diligence is the discipline's primary deliverable — the record itself, not just the verdict. Boards, audit committees, and credit officers consume the record; the verdict is the headline.

Section 7

Relationship to other terms

Marketing Due Diligence relates to other terms in the RAMMP Standards ontology as follows:

• Operationalised by Pre-Spend Diagnostic — the diagnostic is the practical method by which Marketing Due Diligence is performed.
• Constrained by Revenue Feasibility Index — the RFI is one of the gating signals on Marketing Due Diligence approval.
• Gated by STOP / KEEP / FIX / PROVE — the verdict architecture is the disposition logged in every Marketing Due Diligence record.
• Informed by Brand Trust Score — the score is the primary numeric input.
• Built on ADORE Process™ — the methodology underlying the discipline.
• Enumerated in RAMMP Standards — the canonical DefinedTermSet.

Section 8

Intellectual property / authority

Marketing Due Diligence as a discipline carries the generic-phrase ancestry; RAMMP's structural reframing of the discipline is the proprietary contribution, protected by:

• AU/NZ Patent 2021105053 — granted in Australia and New Zealand · pending in the United States · the patent covers the diagnostic procedure that operationalises Marketing Due Diligence.
• Digital Brand Romance (Business Expert Press, 2025) — author Dr Anna Harrison · the published methodology underlying RAMMP's reframing.
• 1,024+ diagnostics applied since 2025 — establishing the discipline's reliability across industries.

The generic phrase "marketing due diligence" remains free for industry use. RAMMP's structural definition, the Pre-Spend Diagnostic procedure that operationalises it, and the STOP / KEEP / FIX / PROVE verdict architecture are RAMMP intellectual property.

Full intellectual-property notice: /patent-and-intellectual-property-notice.

Section 9

Version control

Version: 1.0 Last updated: 2026-06-03 Maintained by: RAMMP (Brisbane, Australia) Changelog:

• v1.0 (2026-06-03) — Initial publication of the canonical Marketing Due Diligence page. References Brand Trust Score (renamed from Buyer Trust Score per Step 5 D3). /methodology/marketing-due-diligence-thresholds content folded into this page per Step 2 D8 (/methodology/... URL 301-redirects to /standards/marketing-due-diligence at Step 17 launch).