Want your investment to deliver? Make mend and repair your mantra
Andrew GeogheganIn a world where less is more, checking insights, aligning KPIs and adopting a mend and repair mindset can make your marketing investment work harder.
In a world where less is more, checking insights, aligning KPIs and adopting a mend and repair mindset can make your marketing investment work harder.
Definitions of marketing are wide-ranging and inconsistent, but it’s up to organisations to work out what it means and how it can help them.
Follow British Airways’ example: for every new ad you make, identify at least one customer experience improvement to go with it.
The effectiveness expert and author of The Long and the Short of It explains how pre-testing has led to more effective ads, focusing on emotional response.
Marketers may like to be believe they can identify with a wide range of people but, in reality, they are as likely to be led by their biases as anyone else.
Agencies will complain pre-testing snuffs out the creative spark, but in reality it helps brands identify the best-performing ads and make them even better.
From positivity and clarity to the need for humility, speaking to a number of top marketing leaders has revealed five common traits that all possess.
Marketers should borrow from the ‘duck-rabbit illusion’ when thinking about what their marketing plan is trying to achieve to ensure direct marketing activity isn’t compromised by an injection of emotion and brand-building campaigns aren’t undermined by focusing on product.
Women’s health is a $1trn per year opportunity yet brands are still failing to represent and communicate to women in a meaningful way.
See the cookie apocalypse as an opportunity to ditch flawed forms of measurement in a quest for greater accuracy.
Brands act to accelerate the value of a business model rather than being assets in themselves. Framing brands as standalone assets will simply serve to alienate finance.
This week our marketing columnist asks and then answers the most annoying question of them all.
Companies only truly value creativity when it’s their product, but most would benefit from a chief creative officer’s honesty and defiance of convention.
Google owner Alphabet has so far failed to demonstrate its readiness for an AI-driven future, where its mission and established products could become redundant.
Time is the variable that most defines marketing success, because consistent growth is the truest test of a brand and its team.
Tight positioning, a respected brand heritage and refusal to overcomplicate things means when it comes to uniting distinctiveness and differentiation, KitKat has it licked.
Startups may be nimble and free to take risks, but that’s because they have to be. There are far more benefits to having the resources of a big brand.
Competing priorities will hold you back in this time of budget pressure and economic stagnation, so focus only on creating an offer that meets customer needs.
The Body Shop pioneered ethical beauty, but that positioning is no longer unique and its owners need to inject life into the brand to arrest its decline.
The moment is approaching when B2B brands realise they need to invest more in brand than performance. Just look at these examples for inspiration.
Many are talking of the ways AI will rip up the rulebook on creativity, but for B2B the biggest disruption AI will cause is to diagnosis.
For B2B firms, investing in brand marketing is the best bet in good times, and it’s an even better bet in bad times when the pool of current buyers shrinks from 5% to 1%.
Ideas generation is a job for people, not data. But when data is paired with good ideas it can be powerful.
Having the right people at the heart of effectiveness programmes is the difference between succeeding and failing.
The price of TV ads has risen much quicker than the price of other channels over the past few years, while viewing has also declined, meaning it could be time for brands to change the channel.
Not everyone will always like it, but addressing cultural tension with genuine creative tension is the only way to drive real change.
Last year was dubbed the ‘Year of the Girl’ but with marketing’s gender pay gap stuck at the 16% mark and women revealed to be taking on more additional responsibilities than men for no extra pay there is clearly still work to be done.
Heads up, this column is about Christmas ads. If you’ve already seen more analysis than you can bear, look away now. But if you’re a woman with a festive to-do list as long as your arm, you might want to read on.
When people feel positive, they are positive about advertising, so brands should be targeting – or, better yet, creating – moments of happiness and relaxation.
More distinctive ads are more memorable, and the holy grail is creative that stands out while also conveying the brand’s core message.
People don’t act the same way every day, their behaviour varies according to their mood and situation, so brands are better off targeting those.
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