Author Archive
Help is at hand
When I first became a marketing director I thought I knew most of what I should of Marketing. Of course we all know you never know enough especially about the customer and there is always someone who knows more than you especially in all things internet!
There I was got the top job in Marketing and rearing to go but like all these things it proved not to be that simple.
I soon found there were not only so many things to remember and recall but a whole new set of demands for which I was not in the slightest prepared. They ranged from those of quite simply being a director and working as part of a board through to structuring the function or considering acquisition as much as advertising as the means of growth.
No problem I thought get on to Amazon and get The Marketing Directors Handbook, well there was a problem as the book did not then exist.
So as my experiences grew I decided that I should go about producing the said book but it was too big a project to do alone and indeed two heads are better than one. So I was very appreciative of the collaboration of Guy Tomlinson who walks the talk at www.marketingdirectors.co.uk
For the past two years or more we have been writing the book so that now The Marketing Directors Handbook is about to be published and is now listed on Amazon.
So the next time you need to know the likes of the best ways of dealing with Merger & Acquisition or working with the Financial Director or quite simply best advice on a re-branding project, it is all in the book. It is intended to be helpful not only to Marketing Directors…
Essential for Marketing Directors
Valuable for ambitious Marketing Managers
Powerful reference for CEOs and Financial Directors
If you would like to know more and register for an advance copy go to The Marketing Directors Handbook.
The book is written in a friendly tone giving advice rather than instruction with many charts and examples. We are sure you will find it very helpful and all the help you will need to be the best marketing director you can be, get the job or manage the board.
Brands: The love hate relationship
Marketing magazine (UK May 14th) has just published a table of the brands we love most and the brands we hate most. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly may brands feature in both lists.
I have a new Ford Mondeo – brilliant car – so I was interested in where Ford as a brand was in the tables. Almost in an identical position @ 32 and 33.
Why is this?
Well it goes without saying that the larger the brand footprint the more people will have been exposed to it. But those who have not got a ‘new’ Ford may still have old views of the product and the brand, and need to justify to themselves that the extra £10,000 they paid for the equivalent Audi or BMW was really worth it. So is that really the value of a brand or lack of it?Yet in understanding brands properly, not simple the using of a name and a logo, we have to engage the emotional values.
The best way of understanding the importance of brand and product is to see
PRODUCTS AS PEOPLE and BRANDS AS FRIENDS
Now with friends the reason we like them is often the reason we don’t like some other people.
Marketing Superior thought: You don’t have a brand unless people have an emotional bond to it. But remember human emotions are fickle so be very careful how you play with them. That is why brand development is one of the key elements of marketing but it doesn’t stop it from being the most mis-understood and the most valued prize.
Ask Ford I’m sure they would like to get an extra £10,000 for every Mondeo!
Branding at the weekend
It is a marketer’s lot that we are never really off the job. Take a glorious weekend a couple of weeks ago… ‘Let’s go to the fair and there is a beer festival on at the pub in the village’ Perfect!!
Yet there were marketing lessons lurking there. Firstly at the fair. No ordinary fair, it was Carters Steam Fair. Every show and every caravan consistently decked out in a superb colour combination of ochre and orange with a strong identifiable logo everywhere with a powerful description. No brand manual, I’ll bet just a family business certain and proud of its identity.
A lesson to every one of us – pride is one of the most important factors in branding and implementation.
Over at the beer festival I started musing where had the phenomenon of the beer festival come from? I reasoned thus…with the headlong pursuit of lagers, cheaper to produce and easier to serve but with the key differentiation being in the expensively won image sustained by TV advertising the big brewers did not support their bitter brands. So into the gap came every Tom Dick and Harry with their micro brewery and silly names yet with a good and interesting product self-selected by the publican. By the way the gap may have been widened by the big brewers practice of guest beers.
Marketing Superior thought; In a big market leave a consumer gap and it will be filled.
So that was how I came to have a pint of Old Tom and thoroughly enjoyable it was too.
Now back to work!
What’s the difference between MARKETING & SALES?
Have you ever wondered why you see many Sales & Marketing Directors and no Marketing & Sales Directors?
Yet it seems there is a constant debate as to what are the differences between Sales and Marketing.
In practice a Sales & Marketing Director will be responsible for the production of the marketing collateral required to support the sales effort, vital of course, but marketing kicks in long before that point. Although it does explain what so many people feel that marketing is dying or has been simply subjugated to this narrow function. Yet the brand has never been more important and the customer has more opportunities to exercise choice than ever before. Perhaps it is best summed up that marketing should spend more time thinking so that sales doing can be more effective.
Just compare these two lists:-
Firstly this is what Sales see as its priorities…
SALES
Targets
Units
Products
Benefits
Buyer
Turnover
Whilst Marketing sees these as being important
MARKETING
Objectives
Market share
Brand
USP & values
Customer
Profit
Objectives
What do you think?
And how to we all work to achieve a better overall relationship between the two functions?
These ideas are taken from The Marketing Directors Handbook shortly to be published see www.themarketingdirectors.co.uk/handbook.htm for details
Honda High Flying
One of the biggest issues today is how to make the brand work across all media.The more technical and formatted the media ( this blog for instance!) the more difficult it is to assert the brand. What this means is that the stronger the brand and its core values are recognised and understood the more the recognition will permeate through all media and positively apply to a range of products.
This is what Honda are successfully doing with their DREAMS campaign which builds a ‘creative sky’ under which all Honda marketing communications can shine. Taken originally, perhaps, from the name of a motor bike the campaign which lifted spirits over the world cup has now been widened to include ‘problem solving’. The bedrock has been to now actively involve the logo with a team putting it together form a giant jigsaw to make HONDA. Powerful stuff.
In a digital and visual world it is staggering to see how many logos are flat and immobile.
Marketing Superior thoughts…
1 – Use the power of televsion to set the brand values and create a communication framework for all your messages
2 – Adapt your logo for the digital world
If you would like to achieve marketing superiority and more effectively align your brand to the digital world visit www.tarrystone.com
Egg Marketing is cracked
The recruitment cost for a new credit card user most be quite high, buying list, creating mailing and sending pieces which offers free balance transfers or other inducements.
Even if it is as low as twenty pounds then what marketer would knowingly and wilfully throw away 160,000 accounts and waste over 3 million of marketing spend.
Well that is what the new owners of egg the credit card have done. Ostensibly on credit grounds only grounds but when pushed they have admitted that low usage and regular full balance payment will have contributed to the decision.
The simple proposition in the letter sent to a friend of mine was that your credit is not good enough and you should check with Experian as to your credit worthiness. My friend did, back it came after spending a fiver or so, to find that he is 999 out of a thousand for credit rating. I am not surprised he is a very high net worth individual having successfully sold several businesses he built up.
It is, of course, the prerogative of any business to have what customers it wants but has no one thought of the damage that has been done to the brand! And where was the marketing thinking in sending a letter that is as far from good customer relationship practice as it is possible to be, no apology, no offer to increase usage, no suggestion of an alternative, just cut up the card and go way.
Where is the good marketing practice to act with such lack of commercial logic as to throw away millions of expenditure when you can, not simply through away, but profoundly upset a regular customer.
Some marketing superior thoughts…
- Be careful when you segment your customers
- Always give customers the chance to give you more of their business (most people have several active credit cards)
- If you are going to ask them to leave why not show them the door by which they leave with an alternative offer that meets your changed customer criteria
- If all else fails let them leave with dignity your brand is worth more that the unnecessary umbrage.
Good marketing is in the new holder
Anyone who travels in London should now have an Oyster card. I do and every day I go to London it’s used a minimum of 4 times so my plastic holder is wearing out. So I was actually pleased when on the entrance to Piccadilly underground I was handed a new holder courtesy of the London Paper and Capital Radio. Spot on targeting, appropriate message and great delivery!
Marketing Superior thought
Good marketing comes from understanding the customer experience and in understanding it reveals excellent opportunities
Welcome to Marketing Superior
The place where we are always striving to do better, to learn more from both successes and failure, to celebrate the good and denigrate the poor and to comment constructively towards the achievement of marketing superiority.
There are many many marketing sites and blogs. All seem to suffer from the same faults: from checklists of must do’s to achieve marketing success; rants from a particular standpoint especially those who mistake the technique and the technology for the solution; white papers masquerading as a marketing truth but essentially espousing the benefits of only one particular software product and well you know what I mean. To my mind they demean the noble art and practice of marketing.
Thus this blog aims to be the counterpoint, to recognise that marketing is always about achieving superiority in the customers’ mind, in the media and in the market place.
This is Marketing Superior.
Looking for the good, championing the best, aiming to drive out the bad
