A few years ago I was involved peripherally with the Chief Marketing Officers Council and their initiatives on marketing performance measurement. More recently I did some consulting work for a luxury auto maker to consolidate marketing data from various online and offline channels and create a dashboard for this information. And more recently still I’ve been thinking about these projects, and marketing measurement more generally, but a little differently than before.
Even before John Wanamaker, the American department store magnate, made that crack about knowing that half of the money he spent on advertising was wasted, just not which half, accurate measurement of marketing’s effectiveness has been the holy grail for those spending the money. And in the last decade or so our ability to measure campaign-level performance has certainly increased. Simply knowing who visited a website, where they came from, what it cost to get them there, not to mention the overall ROI of online transactions, has highlighted just how much uncertainty there is elsewhere. And long before AdWords, away from the glamourous Mad Men world of Madison Avenue, direct response marketers have been pursuing a data-driven approach to getting customers to buy, with ever more sophisticated segmenting and targeting.
It’s tempting to think that the solution to better and more accountable marketing is to shift all of the dollars to activities that can be directly measured. No more big-budget broadcast or print campaigns. Forget sponsoring sporting or cultural events. Definitely cancel the branded blimp. We’re seeing the beginnings of this trend as some of the largest marketers are both reducing overall budgets and shifting an increasing percentage of ad spending online. So far, so good; much of what’s happening is simply a pragmatic approach to reaching customers in the most effective ways.
But then I think about how I actually buy things and why. I’m not arrogant enough to claim I’m immune to marketing, but for it to work on me it needs at least an element of seduction. Long before the point of response I’ve surely been groomed with affinity to certain values, which subsequently I associate with brands and products I come to like and want. That’s quite a complex process, and only a very small part of it is measured by direct responses. I desperately wanted my MINI Cooper S months before it went on sale, in part because I’m one of those awful people who read car magazines, but mostly because its marketers got the brand inside my head long before I could buy one. I didn’t indicate these feelings to BMW in any way (no email subscriptions, or profile on the MINI site), which tells me that at a certain point their marketers had to have the balls to trust that their unmeasurable activities were working.
The point here is that, for aspirational brands in particular there’s typically a period of romance before the transaction, and it can be months or even years in length. Directly measurable online campaigns and related activities in this context are like one night stands, or at least they just aren’t elegant or intelligent enough to work. Remember, too, that aspirational doesn’t mean unattainable; in fact more areas of everyday life are populated with aspirational brands than ever before, to the extent that my urban life feels like it’s full of glass and chrome and the everyday made shinier and more expensive than it used to be.
So the challenge as it relates to the shift of spending online becomes doubly interesting, because the truth is I’m not in the places where my attention used to be, yet the kind of purchase decisions I make are infinitely more complex than a cost per click. I’m unlikely to be influenced by flashes of 30-second genius on TV because I’m not watching TV commercials. Product placement is all well and good, but I feel as though I’ve been trained to spot and reject its crudeness. I suppose the subtleties of good PR must still be working, but its work is fractured across a much wider range of content than I used to read and view.
Social media almost by default has to be the answer since it’s where my attention is more likely to be, but the trouble for marketers is it’s all about relationships that are difficult to access. It’ll be interesting to see if and how it evolves to engage with influence.
Post a Comment