There was a time when advertising (the off line variety) was a ‘must do’ activity for most marketers and their budgets. There were various reasons for this – Business chiefs insisted on it because it was the done thing and high profile, it gained visibility for some brands and their awareness building programmes, or marketers were simply unable to implement another way of gaining exposure.
The well understood big problem with advertising is that it has always been very difficult to gauge how well it’s worked. Sure, you can measure a blip in sales or even, over time, whether a campaign has increased brand/offer recognition and recall, but if it’s a defined, clear ROI you want, forget advertising.
Advertising has also always been untargeted. You chuck it at the wall and hope some sticks. Ok, you can define a target audience or two and tailor creative and media choice to reduce the misses and increase the hits but the outcome will always be, well, hit and miss. The additional problem with being untargeted is that it has always been tricky to capitalise on individual responses – how can you when you don’t know who’s responded, who hasn’t and why.
So stepped in direct marketing. Define a target audience most likely to be receptive to your offers and then, via increasingly sophisticated data acquisition, personalized mailing programmes, follow ups etc. gain and measure responses. If the target doesn’t respond, ask them why. If they do, begin to build a relationship via further mailings, more data capture – ad infinitum. Add a bit of sales force and customer service support + offer development and hey presto a CRM programme has been built.
Now I know that the words above over simplify the issues faced by marketers and the potential components of marketing activity. I also understand that many marketers deploy a mix of on and off line advertising, DM, CRM, PR, events, web presence viral and social marketing activity. Some even have measurements and metrics in place to evaluate value, ROI and effectiveness – hurray, but at the end of the day all these, whilst part of the mix, have a central problem that is becoming increasingly apparent in our rapidly changing world – people don’t want to be talked at by brands and they are increasingly questioning of the messages they see, hear and read. They also have a tool that they are increasingly confident with to help them make their own choices about brands – the internet.
As a result it is hardly surprising that returns on investment in marketing activity generally (particularly the offline variety) are plummeting and as a consequence, business owners are unwilling to invest further and marketers are searching for some other way.
Today’s reality is less about marketers knowing their customers well enough to talk to them more effectively. It is about finding ways for customers (and prospects) to talk to each other in ways that benefit your business. Call it marketing by stealth, being covert, subliminal etc. but the aim has to be to achieve that marketing and business dream – increased brand and marketing effectiveness born from recommendation.
‘Knowing your customer’ is still vitally important – more important than ever. More important still is knowing how to create the right environments for customer groups to talk to each other in order to build brands and project offers more effectively – all without ‘intruding’ into your audiences space by talking at them. And doing this in a way that delivers a clear, ROI.
We at Purple Frog firmly believe that we are entering a brave new world of marketing communication opportunity. One where advertising, DM, CRM, PR etc all have a place but in a supporting role to activity centred around achieving the sort of brand and marketing success that can only be gained from customer advocates talking to each other and others – spreading the word on the brands behalf.
Lets face it, why spend budgets trying hard to convince people to actively involve themselves with your brand, when you can now sow the seeds and let the customer/user groups grow your brand for you. Todays online technology allows this to happen, as does peoples familiarity, trust and confidence in it. In some respects, the principles of achieving marketing success in this way are the same as those used in more ’traditional’ marketing – DM and advertising in particular. The key difference is in how marketers and their agencies use and maximize returns from these principles in our changing world.
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You may also be interested in reading my personal view on this subject relating to a Marketing Week article:
http://purplefrog.co.uk/?p=654