I’ve been reading a report out last month authored by Professor Robert Shaw sponsored by the CIM, CIMA and the DMA called ‘Return on Ideas’. You can download it here.
The report showcases a strategy called “Infinity Model” that aims to show the impact of marketing on companies’ bottom lines. The insights are drawn from Shaw’s conversations and surveys of more than 100 organisations.
Do you agree with the ideas showcased in the report? I think it’s worth a glance or two.
May 27, 2009 at 8:07 pm |
I found that report utterly useless. Marketing is what you do when your product sucks, to paraphrase somebody.
Marketing is extremely simple. Why entire money-sucking departments are dedicated to this practice is a great mystery. All you need is a little bit of market research. If you have a good product that you have SOLD into distribution, the marketing will take care of itself.
Imagine a film. A great film will find distribution and people will go to see it. A bad film will collapse under its own incredible badness no matter how much marketing is performed. The hard part (and the money) is the sales — getting it produced, signing on talent, pitching it to film festivals, obtaining a distribution deal. Marketing is largely a waste of money except for the part where you research what sort of film the market may demand.
June 1, 2009 at 4:45 pm |
I completely disagree with CharlieHipHop. How can a brand, business, or (in his example) movie perform well without people being aware of its existence. No matter how good a film is, if no one knows about it, it will fail.
I think the main problem with this comment is CharlieHipHop’s apperent underplay of what marketing is and what it can accomplish. Google listings, Facebook links, Twitter mentions, even person to person recommendations are all forms of marketing. Not all marketing has to be some large over the top extravagant project, however you still need someone to spread the message that it exists.
That said I’m not that impressed with this report. It was missing out on a very traceable form of marketing, mainly online marketing activities. Although he mentioned that they need to be considered when reviewing the marketing mix, he left out their value when trying to show strong results to the client.
Search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing are all very traceable forms of marketing, that generally allow the brand to follow exactly where their users are coming from and in the case of PPC exactly how much you are paying per conversion.
The scope for interacting with target markets is also massively increased. With rapidly expanding ability to track online trends as they happen, marketers can target and exploit specific up to the minute trends. Using tools like Twitter Search, Google Insights, Yahoo Buzz, Hot Trends, and Reputation Monitors, marketers can listen to the masses, ideally inspiring them with new ways of interacting with their target market and allowing them to make more educated predictions.
Marketers can also use these tools to track the online buzz around a brand or campaign to see what kind of impact it created and if the marketing activity worked to drive people online. This fits in very nicely to the “Demonstrate” stage of Robert Shaw’s Infinity model.
I feel most marketers are aware of all the benefits to adding an online element to up weight their offline activity. I’m just surprised that Robert Shaw didn’t consider them when discussing their ability to also help when trying to show ROI, for both return on investment and return on ideas.
June 4, 2009 at 12:24 pm |
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