Ouch! As a marketer I am sure this figure does sit well with you. Truth be told it is really hard to quantify what our advertising ROI is. It is a hard figure to measure and I am sure most marketers are not sure what their marketing return is.
There is the old saying that 50% of advertising work? We seem to be happy to go with this and every day we see marketers dedicating their budgets to the advertising gods.
There is an old saying that is so overused but so true:
If you don’t change what you are doing, you are doing, you will keep getting the same results.
Personally I think that this is the definition of insanity – especially when I look at what most marketers are currently doing.
The problem with marketing is that everything has changed, and most marketers are not even aware of this. They have been trained in a traditional way and become highly effective technicians in applying the cornerstone of traditional marketing. Yet these cornerstones of traditional marketing no longer work very well.
Most marketers won’t believe me when I say that 99 % of traditional media is wasted and most marketing research does not uncover the real reasons why your customers buy. Traditional big budget marketing is no longer the powerhouse solution it used to be.
And these are the reasons for most brand manager’s existence. I guess it is hard to hear that you are no longer relevant – and we have a huge industry with a vested intrest – namely the advertsing, brand and reaserch industries. They are worth billions in any language or currency.
Here are some of the underlying drivers of this change — and why it is important to you:
Most marketing is about taking an idea and pushing it out through as many channels as possible – whether this is through twitter, TV, Outdoor or whatever. And this is the trap and false sense of comfort marketers get.
The simple truth is your customer doesn’t trust you and the attention they gave you in the past is no longer a guarantee – whether its on TV or on Twitter.
So how do you avoid the trap? Well, the first step is to stop broadcasting (which would effectively shut down about 95% of the marketing departments) and start applying some new rule.
Here is a guideline on what I think the top five changes you need to make:
The canned marketing approach has very little impact — and way too expensive.
To make your marketing effective you need to map it around your customers thought process to create an experience that they want to talk about. In fact they must rave about it. You need to create a Customer Utopia – or as we call it RaveTopia :)
Your business is about relationships and creating a customer experience. It is about your prospects buying into your company and trusting you. It’s about feelings not cold, hard rational facts.
And what are feelings about? Personality.
This archetypal Loyalist personality helps you identify your brand, culture and customer experience. It shows you how you can structure your brand has a positive and a negative side to it.
Your positive personality is your desired brand expression. It is who you are and how you want your customers to experience you.
Your negative personality is expressed when you are not able to manage your brand properly.
The good thing about the negative personality and customer experience so that it allows you to actively manage your brand, culture and customer experience.
When you identify a negative traits appearing in your customer experience and brand culture you know there is something wrong.
If there is perceived value, a customer will buy. And pricing is a question a question of perceived value, where it should be based on value created. This is about getting your customer strategy right.
This can be defined in many different ways. This is best highlighted in the pricing / value pyramid, which is reflected in how well you have created you brand positioning through your brand strategy.
You can create value till the cows come home but if you are building a bigger mouse trap that over specs, you have wasted your time. This is about your customer strategy and managing value and managing your bottom line. So many businesses’ have the potential to go out of business or have to high a cost because they have:
This point is a critical principle in the strategic book: “Blue Ocean Strategies”.
As a principle to guide your pricing strategy you need to look at the value / price pyramid and determine where you want to sit.
Is it a good idea to associate your brand with a major tragedy – even if it is a bit tongue in cheek? And will it impact of customer loyalty?
Iceland’s Mount Eyjafjallajokull recently left hundreds of people stranded and caused untold frustration to thousands of people.
A recent press release by Expand A Sign used this tragedy as a mechanism to show how durable and robust their products are. They boasted that they can keep your brand flying high during the “dullest and most dreary weather conditions”.
They then mentioned that their product survived Hurricane Katrina. You remember, America’s largest natural disaster in terms of human casualties. According to the company, “there really is never a reason not to let your brand soar!”
So the question is what do you associate with the Expand A Sign Brand: High quality or insensitive adverting?
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