Comments on: Let’s talk about wasting money

By: Mary Hayes

Mary Hayes — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:24:36 +0000

Thanks for the thoughts. It’s inspiring me to [attempt] to sharpen my own perspective. At the risk of crying sour grapes, I think my issue has been using MARKETING outcomes to measure the performance of marketing communications. Way back in the day, I remember learning the Four Ps of marketing: product, price, place (distribution) and promotion. The work of marketing communications addresses only one of those, promotion, yet we continue to measure success as if we were affecting all four. If an ad campaign or public relations program inspires intent to purchase, but upon inspection, the product is inferior, unavailable or inappropriately priced, we would call the communications effort a failure. By the same token, if the campaign makes the product a household name, yet nobody buys it, we’d fail as well. I believe the success of a good campaign is the Gestalt of the tangible and intangible results. Anyone have ideas of how we can measure that??

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:12:27 +0000

I believe much of the elusiveness of measuring advertising results lies in improper goal setting. How many times has a client come to you with ambiguous goals like, “I want to build awareness,” or “We need to expand our customer base”? These goals don’t lend themselves to measurement. If I own a tree service and a customer tells me “I want some trees gone,” how am I supposed to know how many trees they want removed and which ones? I’d need to know specifics so I could do my job to the best of my abilities and make my customer happy. It’s no different in advertising. Clients need to have specific goals in mind and if they don’t we, as their communications partner, need to help them define their goals in the onset if we ever hope to measure success with any sort of accuracy.

By: Big O

Big O — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:09:46 +0000

Suppose you are my client. How would you respond if I offered to design a cool home or office for you for $125 bucks then, for an additional $19.95 up front, redo it later if it didn’t work out? Interesting marketing strategy. I would need to bump up my prices of course; however, you get the drift. I’ve always felt the best marketing strategy (relationship strategy) is to “do unto others as they would like you to do unto them.” A friend once told me, “Either always do it right the first time, or advertise.” Apparently, the big box retailers need to advertise.