In this excerpt from Facebook book Build Brilliant Brands, published today, Samsung Europe’s marketing director Benjamin Braun explains why marketers want to think about evidence and how there is still room for meerists and clowns in the midst of the numerical crisis.
Over the past two years, some of THE WORLD’s world-leading control consulting firms, KPMG and McKinseys, have begun examining other categories in which they can apply their expertise (and qualify the king’s ransom for it). media, virtual and marketing.
From now on, CFOs and CEOs have no interest in joining the assembly when an arts company knocks on the door; in general, it will be the marketing manager who will do it. communication about marketing, it is not the CMO that opens it.
Instead, they’ll talk to the CFO, CEO, or board chairman and say something like, “Your marketing industry has no idea. We’ve analyzed the numbers and you can get a lot more out of your investment. In fact, he’s investing too much. ” We can reduce your expenses and deliver better results. “
CFOs and CEOs are people usually based on evidence, so it’s music to your ears. They’ve probably suspected a little bit of marketers, and now, thanks to this meeting, they still have some influence to spread them to their inefficiencies. I’ve noticed this happening before and I think it’s going to happen more and more.
We have to recognize that it is partly the fault of the marketing specialist because we have not been able to prove our value. If you ask a marketing team how many products they’ve sold after spending X amount on a campaign, chances are you might not be able to tell them. Today, most marketing groups would not be able to articulate their effects in a way that impressed the president, CEO, or CFO.
If, as a large corporate money spender, you can’t get your value, it starts to seem so reckless. As marketing specialists, we have left ourselves open to exposure. How can marketing mature?
One thing we can do is start with econometrics: a shown regression style that allows you to scientifically demonstrate how many additional sales dollars you get for every dollar spent on marketing.
We installed econometrics at Audi during my tenure as uk marketing director. We used an outdoor company to do that, and I felt like the top unsafolded user in the room because many of them had a double PhD. How much cash we would like to sell X amount of Audi Q8 SUV, what kind of creation and which channels we will have to use to do this.
Before that, the CFO gave me part of the budget I asked for and we put ourselves in a verbal dispute about it, the econometrics have made those conversations much easier, I had a clinical style to take out the amount of cash I needed to achieve the company’s goals and why.
I can just show you the Excel spreadsheet and say, “If you only give me a portion of what I ask, I can only sell the same amount of cars. “This eliminated a lot of tension in the room.
Gather your evidence from sources
At all times we will have to look beyond the spreadsheet when we gather evidence to tell our decision-making. I think we could sit in big offices looking for spreadsheets from our clients, and then pass out and get to know them. a big difference between seeking knowledge of the survey and listening to genuine people, either on the user or over the phone. You have to do one of the two things to strengthen your evidence.
And of course, if you want to know what consumers think, you don’t want to sort out dear searches, you can jump on social media and see for yourself what other people like and don’t like.
It is also vital that you use your product and service yourself. It’s shocking how many marketing specialists aren’t doing this. How will you have an opinion about your product if you don’t review it?Before joining Audi, I had never worked in the automotive industry, and in fact I am not an oil enthusiast, so I spent the first few weeks of my time there working in concessions and repair shops. I can use and perceive your systems and appreciate how confusing and messy it can be. The direct delight of the product and service it offers makes it a much more powerful leader.
Let them tell you your instincts
At the macro level, econometrics can provide evidence of the price of making an investment in marketing and, in general, marketing departments want to start by relying more on evidence than instincts, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for instinct. , the creativity required for transformational replacement will require an act of faith.
I’m getting increasingly tired of last year’s Cannes Lions International Creativity Festival. People told me about optimization throughout the week, appearing outside of their A/B tests and multivariate testing platforms. My frustration was that this is what we all do anyway. , are only hygiene factors.
If you want to succeed, you can’t count on small additional earnings. Teams can come and do a brilliant task to optimize your marketing expenses, but you want that artistic leap. To do this you must rely on artistic agencies and aspect thinkers: other people who arrive at the end of the day, disappear for a long lunch, paint all night and bring a solution that can remodel their business.
I’ll give you some examples from my past life. I worked comparethemarket. com at the beginning of the company.
At the time, we couldn’t differentiate ourselves from any of the other value comparison sites, whether MoneySuperMarket, GoCompare or Confused. com.
Only when the market manager, Mark Vile, and a company called VCCP dared to be others, did we end up with suricatos. There is no point in having two Russian meerists as spokespersons for a change site in the UK. But guess what? It worked. In the first year of the campaign, the market percentage of the site increased by 76%.
Then, when I was at Audi, we worked with the art firm BBH to produce a film in which clowns drove cars. We knew we had to do anything else to get through. We’ve doubled the return for every $1 invested. Possibly you wouldn’t get such a rollback just in optimization. He does this by running with other brave people who have the ability to obviously articulate what the business challenge is, write a thesis and then let the artistic ones master it.
Sometimes you have to take the step. Sometimes his instincts are full of enough knowledge and he can make that leap.
I call it “intestinal knowledge. ” We all listened to Henry Ford’s quote: “If I had asked other people what they needed, they would have said horses faster. “He left and created the T. Model Sometimes, other people say one thing, but they need to say something else. Sometimes you have to take that leap for them.
This means that, as marketing specialists, we want to publicize the logo association to give consumers an explanation of why to buy our non-rational products. One way or another, I have to motivate the visitor to buy a Samsung TV or washing machine, whenever I want it is presented through other products on the market. We want to invest in the logo so that it’s fair enough and aims for other people to say, “Yes. That’s why I’m buying a Samsung!”
Finding the combination
We want this logo to be solid while still being evidence-based. Good marketing specialists use a combination of “tougher” measures to demonstrate what they will offer (incremental sales) and “softer” support to find out how they will do it, encompassing the irrational aspect of human habit and creativity.
The threat is that we spend all our time portraying righteous representations. As marketing specialists, we’ll have to keep doing it, but we’ll also have to defend ourselves by demonstrating that our campaigns have an effect on sales. consider us not only as an artistic team, but as a team that generates 3 things: enthusiasm for a logo; Consideration for the product and finally the conversion of this love logo into sales, only then will we gain credibility in the convention room.
This article refers to: World, Advertising, Marketing, Marketing Services, Brand
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