If you’ve spent any time in marketing, you’ve probably come across Mark Ritson. Veteran university lecturer, host of the MiniMBA in Marketing, regular Marketing Week columnist and hugely in-demand speaker, Mark has probably forgotten more about marketing than the rest of us have ever learned.
So it was a real treat to have an hour of Mark’s time on a recent webinar, where he shared 5 key things that really matter for effective marketing:
#1: Marketing has to start with the customer
“Marketing is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, that is from the customer’s point of view.” – Peter Drucker
Marketers often proclaim to understand their customers, but the reality is that very few actually do. Mark points out that as marketers we are surrounded by our brand and our company values every day. But this simply isn’t true for consumers. Any brand, even one they repeatedly buy from, is only a small blip on their consciousness. Once you realise this, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
The other lesson from this is that you’re probably thinking about “competitors” in the wrong way. Your competition isn’t just other providers in the same category; it’s anything else that your target audience could spend their budget on. Taking Spotler as an example, we’re competing with expos, a new CRM, or even a new marketing employee!
#2: The Long and The Short Of It
Les Binet and Peter Field are leading advertising experts who studied hundreds of marketing case studies, and produced this graph:
What the graph shows is that marketing comes in 2 distinct flavours; Activation and Brand Building. Activation means short-term promotions, ads that drive an immediate action. Brand Building is more about making sure the brand is known. Activation is rational, Brand Building is emotional.
The wrong lesson to take from this research is that it’s an either/or scenario. Effective marketing combines both, building up the brand to the wider audience while hitting particular segments (e.g. lapsed customers) with highly targeted Activations. Binet & Field’s research even provides the way to divide your resources: 50-50 for B2B, 60-40 in favour of Brand Building for B2C.
What Mark has found is that most companies are not getting the split right, and the reason is short-term thinking. Most marketers need to plan their activity on a yearly basis. Over a 6 to 12-month timeframe, Activation produces vastly better results. However, Mark says “You have to produce results in the short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term. And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.”
#3 Most marketers suck at creating briefs, but they aren’t aware of it
“Teaching marketers to be creative. It’s like teaching my dog to tap dance. You know, it’s theoretically possible but pointless, right?” – Mark Ritson
Whatever the size of your team, it’s impossible to get everything done all of the time. And if you bring in experts, you need to give them a brief.
The Better Briefs project investigated how both marketers and agencies feel about the state of brief writing in the UK. And what they found was disturbing:
Marketers think they’re fantastic at writing a good clear brief. Agencies say “you really aren’t”.
The most commonly cited missing element was clear strategic direction. Marketers as a whole are far too quick to jump to the tactical decisions of a project, without first considering the overarching strategy.
If you’re hiring an agency, take this to heart and ask them what they need for a brief to be good.
#4 Distinctiveness matters more than Differentiation
Differentiation: How is my brand perceived to be different from my competitors? McDonald’s vs Burger King
Distinctiveness: how much do I stand out in the mind of the customer? How much do I come to mind in buying situations? Does Burger King pop into the customer’s head when she’s hungry?
“In the world of brand management that I came from in the 80s, and 90s, we believed that there was a role for distinctiveness, that you built brand awareness, as we called it. 25% of your job was making people aware of your brand. The rest, 75%, was then differentiating it, giving it a brand image that was different and more positive than the competition. As we learn more about how consumers truly think, I think what we’re seeing is a reversal of those two.” – Mark Ritson
The thing that brands get wrong in this case links back to point #1, market orientation. After some period of time, they start to believe that their brand needs a refresh, that their audience is tired of seeing the same thing over and over, whether that be a logo or a brand colour. However, once you realise that even your most engaged audience thinks about your brand far, far less than you do, you understand that this is nonsense. When was the last time you thought, “Gee, Sainsbury’s has been orange for ages, why don’t they switch it up a bit?”?
#5 When it comes to channels, more is more
“Provided you can afford them and you’ve got scale, the more channels the better. The effectiveness line keeps generally going up.” – Mark Ritson
Mark drew on some work done by Analytic Partners in the USA, which found that campaigns which used 2 channels were 19% more effective than campaigns which only used 1. Importantly, which channels wasn’t important (email, digital, outdoor, TV, etc.). Campaigns which used 3 channels were 23% more effective, 4 channels 31% more, and 5 channels 35% more effective.
Any pair of channels is more effective than doubling the money you put into any single channel. This is the power of diversity applied to the media landscape. There are plenty of studies around that show that diversity among your marketing team produces better results, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the same applies to the campaigns we run.
