Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
This article by Stefan Stern in the Financial Times this week caught our eye. It makes the point that marketing services have become the butt of procurement teams who are eager to save money and feel that this fluffy subject of marketing is fair game. We know the feeling! This is, of course, a tactical move and we wonder what the effect will be in the long-term of cutting back on marketing spending.
In the article Stern leans heavily on Philip Kotler who is always good for an insight or two. Kotler believes that marketing professionals in corporates are better at tactical rather than strategic decisions. He postulates that maybe it would be better to split the marketing teams in to one working on current products (and therefore be responsible for tactics) and another team looking longer term (and therefore be responsible for strategic moves). These are interesting thoughts.
The marketing team must aim higher
By Stefan Stern
Published Financial Times 2nd March 2010
The C-suite just got bigger, again. The US advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day has appointed a new “chief compensation officer” to lead their negotiations on the fees they charge their clients. It is a sign that this agency has had enough of being squeezed by its clients’ procurement officers. Marketing is fighting back. The Mad Men would be proud.
It is easy to see why, of all the services that a company might buy in from outside, marketing is likely to be the most energetically haggled over. Chief executives have long bemoaned the difficulty of knowing exactly what value they have derived from their marketing spend. Out of that frustration arises a natural desire to be extra tough on the costs of marketing activity.
But it is not as though marketing has got any easier in recent times. The opposite is true. Experienced consumers in mature markets have been exposed to just about every trick in the marketing playbook. Cynicism over the claims made by businesses for their products can be deep. Unsurprisingly, marketing departments can find themselves becoming a convenient scapegoat for the leaders of struggling businesses. But in a downturn the real difficulty lies simply in selling anything to world-weary customers who may be satisfied with good-enough but unexciting products.
One person who displays no world-weariness at all is Philip Kotler, the 79-year-old “father of modern marketing”. I met Professor Kotler in London recently and, even after five decades pursuing his subject, he was eager to look ahead and consider new directions for the discipline.
While the current economic climate was not making life easy for marketers, Prof Kotler told me, the crisis had brought one refreshing development: “At least it’s the finance people who are getting blamed for a change.”
Wise-cracks aside, Prof Kotler has chosen this moment of crisis to ask some big questions about what marketing actually does. “Is marketing the enemy of sustainability?” was one of them. For years the task for marketers was to persuade customers that the latest upgrade, the newer model, was a must-buy. But it is time to challenge that orthodoxy, he said.
In a resource-deprived world, businesses cannot hurl more and more product at customers, supported by extravagant marketing budgets. Prof Kotler recalled the message of a book published three years ago, Firms of Endearment, written by Rajendra Sisodia, David Wolfe and Jagdish Sheth.
The authors found that some of the most successful companies in fact spent much less on marketing than their weaker rivals. But they used the word-of-mouth effect of unpaid advocates – loyal customers – to boost their reputation.
Marketing needed to think not just about the company’s “share of wallet”, but also its “share of heart”, these authors said. “Earn a share of the customer’s heart and she will gladly offer you a bigger share of her wallet.”
Prof Kotler plans to develop this idea in his latest book – called, perhaps inevitably, Marketing 3.0 – to be published in two months.
Another challenge for marketing is to assert itself at the heart of the company’s strategic thinking (an idea also suggested by London Business School’s Nirmalya Kumar in his book Marketing as Strategy). “If you have the right people in marketing it could become your engine for growth,” Prof Kotler told me. But while they might be quite creative on tactics, he added, not so many marketing professionals can do the strategic work.
So why not split the department in two? A larger, downstream marketing team working on current products, with a much smaller, strategic team looking at new markets and new ideas for the coming two to three years.
This could work – as long as the interests of customers do not fall between the cracks of organisational silos. As Harvard Business School’s Ranjay Gulati has shown, for all that businesses talk about being “customer-centric” (and marketing is supposed to represent “the voice of the customer”), many simply are not. “They look at customers only through the lens of existing products,” Prof Gulati says.
Right now marketing needs to aim high. That is what Prof Kotler is urging people to do. And he was happy to concede that, as so often, Peter Drucker was ahead of everyone on this topic, too. He even provided a handy mission statement. “The aim of marketing,” Drucker once said, “is to make selling unnecessary.”
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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Much has been written on the subject of brands – not least by B2B International! As we know, a brand is made up of many things – name, logo and values to name but a few. But can there be any doubt about the importance of a brand name? In a Thursday Night Insight article last year, Chrissie Douglas gave us some hints on selecting a brand name:
- Brand names should be simple so that they are easy to understand, pronounce and spell. Two words in the name should be considered the maximum.
- Brand names should be vivid in imagery so that the mnemonics present strong memory cues.
- Brand names should be familiar sounding so that much of the information to which the name relates is already stored in the mind.
- Brand names should be distinctive so that the word attracts attention and does not become confused with other brands.
So, what happens if you get it wrong?
According to research by YouGov/G2, Cillit Bang has been voted the UK’s most disliked brand name. Of the 2,000 British consumers surveyed, a quarter of women, a fifth of men and 27% of over-55s did not like the brand name. Yet, the cleaning brand, which was launched in 2005 by Reckitt Benckiser, is actually considered by its owner to be a “power brand” and its sales show it to be an extremely successful product. So, clearly, brand name is not everything.
Yet, of the top 10 most disliked brand names (shown below), four are new names for previously known brands, including 3 in the top 5:
- Cillit Bang
- Cif
- Starbucks
- Pasta Hut
- Snickers
- Veet
- Accenture
- Aldi
- Plenty
- Mates
Cif used to be known in the UK as Jif, Snickers was for many years called Marathon, and Veet previously went by the name Immac. This perhaps underlines the importance of getting the brand name right in the first place. Once people have started to associate certain values and attributes with a brand, any changes can lead to confusion or mistrust. Unless you recognise the importance of brands and adopt a well thought-out marketing and communications rebranding strategy, you could find yourself with a lot of brand rebuilding work to be done.
To find out more about branding, please refer to several of our white papers, including:
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Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Most of you reading B2B International’s blog will be marketers of b2b products and services. But how often do you think about those end consumers? They may not be able to buy your products in stores, but there is a school of thought which says that if you do market your business-to-business product or service to consumers, you could create new demand from potential business partners.
So says ‘B-to-B-to-C’, an interesting article in September 30 issue of Marketing News.
The article reminds us that behind the face of many consumer products and services, there’s a business-to-business brand that distinguishes the product from the competition. These b2b ‘ingredient’ brands all help to create the product that the end consumer is ultimately looking for. Some b2b brand managers therefore market to consumers, hoping that if end-users care about their brands, business partners will embrace them and promote them.
If this is a route you wish to go down – and there can be little doubt that this is a bold strategy to adopt – there are no hard and fast rules as to how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to the different business and consumer marketing efforts. Indeed, if not done correctly, marketing your b2b brand directly to consumers can be a very easy way to spend a lot of money with very little return.
A good starting point is – as always – thorough research. Research can demonstrate to you whether your brand possesses a distinct value and whether it could impact positively on a consumer brand’s profile and price point. If this is the case, consumer marketing may be an option for your b2b brand.
Try to convince your b2b client to promote your brand on their product: this will make your b2b ‘ingredient’ matter to consumers. Just make sure that your ingredient brand’s stand-out attribute is clearly explained to the end consumers so you can ultimately encourage them to demand products that possess your brand. To do this, its distinctiveness needs to resonate with end users, so make sure your research shows that consumers see the value of your brand. A segmentation study may, for example, determine which types of consumers would be attracted to your brand offering.
The article finishes with some words of advice for anyone doing B-to-B-to-C marketing: You need to help the consumer products brandishing your ingredient to succeed. Put simply, if they win, you win.
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Monday, January 12th, 2009
Market research remains on the agenda
There’s no doubting that times are tough for many companies right now. So it’s pleasing for us to note that marketers are continuing to recognize the value of market research in helping their organizations to not only survive, but thrive.
A survey by Anderson Analytics of 643 members of the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), shows that one in every 10 of these US marketing executives foresees a much greater use of market research over the coming months, with a further 3 in 10 expecting at least some increase in market research activity.
A further 4 out of every 10 is not expecting to see a change, but even this can be taken as a real positive at a time when marketing budgets are being squeezed and marketers are coming under pressure to justify any expenditure.
B2B International has recently published a white paper on measuring and maximizing the return on investment of market research. To read this paper, please click here.
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008
In a week of posts that we might as well as prefaced as “How market research can help you or your organisation”, today we look at how assessing market trends can help develop future strategies for all sorts of companies.
Given the time of year (supposedly summer for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere!) it seems particularly apposite to take a look at the tourism industry and what qualitative research has delivered for Britain’s tourist agency VisitBritain.
VisitBritain is Britain’s national tourism agency, tasked with marketing Britain in 36 countries in addition to promoting England in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. British tourism is worth approximately £86 billion to the UK economy every year. Some £66 billion of this is generated by domestic residents on trips taken within the UK, a further £16 billion by overseas visitors to Britain. It is Britain’s fifth largest industry and employs over two million people.
General speaking, Britain’s main influx of overseas visitors have tended to come from the US, Germany, France, Spain and Ireland. The market is, however, changing – especially as Asia is beginning to play a more important role in the world tourism market and destined to be the driving force for outbound and inbound tourism over the coming years.
Europe as a whole is forecast to enjoy a 30% increase in visits from Asia and a 31% rise from the Middle East over the next couple of years. During the same period, Europe is expected to experience only a 14% increase from North America, traditionally one of Britain’s main money earners. The falling dollar exchange rate is partly to blame, with North Americans now looking for cheaper, more affordable destinations. Britain is also slipping down the “must see now” list because of the growing popularity of “new” destinations such as India, Thailand and Croatia.
Research continues to help us understand what people want from a holiday and subsequent insights show us how we can meet their requirements. Qualitative research is used extensively to help VisitBritain develop this understanding, with the insights gained helping shape strategy in an increasingly competitive environment.
The above originally appeared in the July/August edition of “In Brief”, the Association for Qualitative Research’s bi-monthly update.
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