Welcome to the first of a monthly series by Robert Passikoff, Ph.D., president of New York-based marketing firm Brand Keys.
I had an interesting (some might say “spirited”) end-of-year discussion at the American Marketing Association (AMA) Brand Management Shared Interest Group. Some of the issues and discussion points stayed with me over the holidays, and I thought I’d share them.
Someone in the group pointed out that the demand for brand and marketing accountability is up. This is not new, nor should it have been a revelation to those who make marketing and branding their businesses. Neither, for that matter, is the fact that CEOs and CFOs are more and more reluctant to “buy into” marketing and advertising programs where there’s no valid accountability measures in place. Forwarding along to the executive suite marketing and communication recommendations and budget requests that are devoid of some degree of reasonable ROI is only placing extra stress on a structure that wasn’t up to code in the first place.
Someone in the group pointed out that average tenure for a CMO looks to be around 16 months. Or 22 months. Or 18. Whichever, CMOs are hardly poster boys for long-term job security.
The shortness of the typical CMO’s tenure is a tangible manifestation of top management’s frustration with the inability and/or unwillingness of marketing and branding and advertising and the tactic of the month to provide measures that correlate to – let alone predict – actual, positive market behavior, increased levels of consumer engagement, sales, or profitability.
In the face of the commoditization of virtually every b-to-b and b-to-c product and service category, we’ve discovered that 70% of the consideration/purchase/loyalty decision is emotionally based. Not the touchy-feely concepts of the last century. Not the image items that agencies love so well. But actual category-specific, emotional elements that engage consumers enough to make them loyal to the brand. If you’ve been trading away category specificity for cross-category image comparisons, you’re not conducting your marketing from an emotional foundation. Or not doing it so that you can provide real accountability metrics. Or truly engage customers.
To successfully do those things you have to recalibrate your definition of brand equity. We recommend that folks ignore the outdated definitions (they more often than not relate to imagery or – yes, even in this marketing environment – brand awareness), and use this as an operational definition:
Brand equity is the degree to which a brand meets or exceeds the consumer expectations for a category in which it competes.
Many of the components that make up those expectations are emotionally based. They account for 70% of the decision process. Happily, emotional drivers can be quantified using customer loyalty metrics, which require “fusing” (and quantifying) of the emotional and rational elements you need to ensure success.
If your marketing department or agency folks are throwing around terms such as “emotional bonding,” “bonding with our consumer,” or “engaging our customers emotionally,” ask them how. How are they doing that? Beyond using music that was popular in the 1960s or resuscitating some old ’50s TV stars in “classic” black and white.
These days you need more than creative to get the job done. You need to be strategically engaging the customer, and the only way you do that is to make sure that all your marketing and communication activities reinforce the brand in ways that help it meet or exceed customer expectations.
Using that perspective, you can get CEOs and CFOs to “buy into” marketing and advertising programs – especially when you can show a nearly straight-line correlation to sales and profits. Or a high correlation with positive behavior toward the brand. Something beyond a “remember how popular this song used to be” rationale, a favorite “emotional” tactic much-used these days for aging boomers.
The truth is that with predictive metrics, CEOs and CFOs don’t much care what paradigm is in place or, for that matter, which long-dead sitcom star you’ve negotiated up from the vaults. Not as long as they can look at a spreadsheet with brand and marketing metrics that relate to sales and profitability.
That many advertising agencies and branding consultancies have not invested the intellectual capital to develop such metrics and instead continue to rely on measures that were out-of-date as long ago as 1980 or just keep hoping that some other vehicle du jour will come along to distract management has only exacerbated the problem. And as long as both companies and consultancies sit around and wait for a universally available silver-bullet metric to “show up” in their marketing toolboxes, the problem will remain. Doing what you did in the last century won’t work much longer. Just acknowledging the need is not enough.
Remember, the job you save might just be yours!
Network
