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Is Marketing Dead? Marketing Consultant says…

by admin | Aug 27, 2012 | Blog

NO!

Of course a marketing consultant is not going to admit that the profession is dying as proposed by the now famous article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog, titled “Marketing Is Dead.”

This particular marketing consultant is certainly jealous of the controversial title of the article and the publicity it has received but has to disagree vehemently with the proposition that marketing is dead, not just to defend all marketing consultants and our profession, but because the claim is simply not true, especially when you examine the small business segment, which is yet to get a handle on the basic principles of marketing in general, let alone the more complex issues.

Firstly, lets recap the main points made by the article and then look at the so called evidence, to see whether I personally and my fellow marketing consultants in fact died on the fateful day of August 9th when this outlandish claim pronounced us dead.

Proposition 1:
Studies have confirmed that buyers are no longer paying much attention and traditional marketing communications (Traditional marketing as defined buy the author — includes advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications)

Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.

Rebuttal 1:
You don’t say! Wow, we marketing consultants have had our head in the sand all this time!?

For SME’s, based on the 2011 Hubspot Study, Inbound Marketing (prospects find you; Social Media, SEO, PPC and Blogs) has a 62% lower Cost Per Lead than Outbound Marketing (Direct Mail, Trade Shows, Telemarketing).

The situation is similar at the top end of town, with more and more companies investing less and less into traditional media and more and more into online and social media marketing, where dialogue can be had with their customers and prospects.

And whether the author, Bill Lee, likes it or not, all of these in-bound efforts still need skills of advertising, PR, and marketing communication professionals, albeit skills that now need to be upgraded through ongoing professional development, but again this is nothing new, it’s called change!

Additionally, Mr.Lee needs to be reminded that ‘branding’ is not a ‘traditional marketing communication’, but the result of them. Here are 2 articles on ‘what is branding’ – the most misused and misunderstood term in business today!

http://www.qubepartners.com/blog/and-then-there-was-brand

http://www.qubepartners.com/blog/what-is-a-brand-in-the-words-of-a-few-good-men

Proposition 2:
Studies show that CEOs have lost all patience with marketers and say they lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and are sick of all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.

Rebuttal 2:
Marketers are losing out to the bean counters in the boardroom, however assuming brand equity can not be linked to organisational success, which it actually can be:
http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap and
http://www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands/Best-Global-Brands-2011.aspx
the CEO’s and their distinguished consultants do not have anything to replace the old world marketers with!

Additionally, and especially after the spate of recent global meltdowns, everyone is questioning the value of these overpaid CEO’s. So who cares what they think? Let them like sheep cut their marketing budgets which they regularly do during every economic downturn and they can then watch their competitors who keep investing into marketing pass them by:

1. A number of studies conducted since WWII showed something that marketers have known all along – keep marketing through the downturn. The following quote is from Professional Marketing, Oct-Dec 2008 – article titled “All Hands On Deck”: “…companies that increased marketing spend (relative to market size) during a recession, increased their return on capital employed by 5% in the recovery, compared to a 1% decline for the budget cutters”

2. Recent UK research, “Values of Design FactFinder by the Design Council” has shown that:

Rapidly growing businesses are nearly six times as likely as static ones to see design as integral.
Shares in design-led businesses have outperformed the FTSE 100 by more than 200% over the past decade.
For every £100 a design alert business spends on design, turnover increases by £225.
Businesses that add value through design see a greater impact on business performance than the rest.

And design is an integral part of the brand communication process, the very process that Bill Lee proclaims as a dead discipline.

Proposition 3:
In today’s increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn’t work so well, it doesn’t make sense, because organization hires people — employees, agencies, consultants, partners — who don’t come from the buyer’s world and whose interests aren’t necessarily aligned with his, and expects them to persuade the buyer to spend his hard-earned money on something.

Rebuttal 3:
This one is the simplest proposition to shoot down. Obviously the problem is not hiring the right marketing people! Part of being a good marketer is the ability to get into people’s minds and hearts. Regardless of whether the marketing consultant is a user of the product or service they are promoting, the value of a marketing consultant is to be able to see challenges from the customer perspective and bring new solutions to the problem. If Apple asked their customers to design an MP3 player and a new phone they may have ended up with better products rather than the revolutions that were the iPod and iPhone. Great marketers have been able to give something of value to customers that customers didn’t even know they wanted.

The author then proposes solutions that every marketing consultant would certainly agree with as they have always been the backbone of successful marketing such as building passionate communities or tribes around your brand, targeting customer influencers, looking after VIP’s and assisting them to become advocates.

Marketing is evolving!
In conclusion, let’s put things in perspective – Marketing is not dead or dying, it like most other professions has some problems in the board room, but at least we don’t have a problem of image in the bedroom, as marketing is still seen as a sexy profession, albeit probably for all the wrong reasons.

'What is a brand' in the words of a few good men

by admin | Aug 15, 2012 | Blog, Promotion, Strategy

‘What is a brand’ is still the most misunderstood and misused concept in the small business arena.

In previous blogs I have at length discussed the fact that it is not a logo, name or packaging, but the total sum of perceptions that your customers and prospects have about your business or organization.

It is what they think and feel about you and those emotions and thoughts are the result of your target audience experiences with your company.

But there is an even simpler way to look at the concept of brand, the way that the world of business looked at it before the word became a way for ad agencies to not only examine competitive strategies in their bid to sell to the mass market in the 1950s but also a way to mystify the advertising process and hence become the guardians of the ‘brand’.

So what did business people say before the word brand entered the everyday vocabulary of business media?

Here’s the way three great mean described:

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it”
-Benjamin Franklin

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 min to ruin it. If you think about that you do things differently.”
-Warren Buffett

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
-Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com

So what is a brand?

Simple – it’s your reputation. So brand building is actually all about building and protecting your reputation. Although I hate the somewhat old fashioned and hence manipulative sounding title of the book that at one stage outsold the Bible, the message in it is sincere and well meaning and one that has not been adopted anywhere near enough. I’m talking about a book that gives us all the most basic and amazing principles of persuasion, reputation building and managing people -“How to Win Friends and Influence People”

The next 4 blogs will summarize the 4 chapters of Dale Carnegie’s must read book to effective communication and illustrate the way they directly relate to the AIDA (Attention | Interest | Desire | Action) model of advertising.

Junk Mail in my Letterbox

by admin | Apr 27, 2012 | Blog

A recipe for depressing consumers and marketers alike! Here they are laid out on my kitchen counter:

The quality of “stuffing” in our letter boxes certainly justifies this paper waste being called Junk Mail! Here’s a sample from just one day, which is typical of type and quality SME (small medium enterprise) Junk Mail versus big retailer catalogs.

These are 2 distribution companies:

1. Letterbox Deals which comes in a brochure format – this one had around 30 pages and 27 Advertisers

2. Business Link, which is Local Advertising company which sells the space, prints and then distributes into mailbox – they had 21 advertisers all as loose leaf or brochures in different sizes and formats.

The overall standard of these and all other junk mail I have ever received is pathetic.

Most rules of design and copywritng have been broken / ignored (fact is the owners of these brands just don’t know what they don’t know).

Letterbox Deals – 8 out of 27 were just reasonable, or at least acceptable.

Business Link – 1 out of 21 was good (and it was a Franchise – Step Into Life), 1 was ok, the rest a perfect example of what not to do when it comes to Copywriting and Design.

The ratio of terrible to reasonable is the same in your local newspaper, Manufacturer’s Monthly and most other trade mags.

Interestingly the standard in North America (USA and Canada) is much higher, due to the more competitive nature of their markets.

The only reason most of these businesses are still alive is because their competition is just as bad and consumers have effectively no choice!

And here’s the bit that makes me happy – business owners who get this will prosper by developing a brand, communicating clearly, effectively and utilizing basic communication principles.

Importance of PR for Brand Positioning of Small Businesses (SME's)

by admin | Feb 2, 2012 | Blog, Promotion

The “birth of a brand” is achieved with publicity, not advertising. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it will not have a chance in the marketplace. It’s a window into your brand identity.

PR automatically generates greater credibility through “unbiased editorial” rather than a “paid” message.

The ultimate cost effective guerrilla marketing tool, PR can give ‘David’ brand positioning advantages over the larger and better-funded Goliath!

Successful and correctly implemented Public Relations campaign can deliver:

Greater visibility and exposure than traditional / paid advertising
Greater frequency levels than traditional / paid advertising

at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

Importance of PR for Small Businesses (SME's)

by admin | Feb 1, 2012 | Blog

The “birth of a brand” is achieved with publicity, not advertising. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it will not have a chance in the marketplace.