Successful Marketing Part 7 – Creative Problem Solving

Most marketers have a reputation for being creative, although this is often due to the marketers’ remit to develop advertising and promotions. Neverthless this is a strength to use to help your colleagues. If the CEO’s role is to manage the big picture and the financial director’s is to manage the numbers, then the task of creating ideas lies with the marketing director.

Using creativity to solve the problems of the business as whole is an area where the marketing director and his/her team can make a substantial contribution and carve out a truly distinctive role.  This is consistent and justifiable in context of the marketer’s main challenge – to ensure that products and services stand out and appeal in the market place.

So take the lead in demanding and helping create genuinely new and powerful  solutions to build your business. Encourage and work collaboratively with your colleagues to solve the problems that your business faces.  Even if the problem lies outside of your functional area the health of the business remains your primary responsibility.

New ideas are essentially new combinations of old ideas. To establish credibility as a creative problem-solver requires skill, tools and bravery. With the right skills and tools anyone can be creative.  The more knowledge and understanding you can call on the more creative your solution will be. With a well planned approach all problems are soluble. Workshops can be both cathartic and powerful problem solving forums as long as they are carefully facilitated.  If bravery does not come naturally remember that it is a just state of mind – so be confident and go for it!

Some of The Marketing Directors' Creative Tools

To judge creativity give yourself a framework to work from. This can be as specific or detailed as you wish. From the criteria in your brief, for example, fit with the strategic plan or your brand to the ability to generate the desired business outcomes. A simple tip to judge creative ideas is to ask yourself if someone has thought of it before.

Finally no amount of problem solving will have any value unless you use it to make a decision. Bear three principles in mind.

1. The more you know the better will be your decision (and this is where consumer research can be invaluable).

2. Trust your instincts. What is wrong is probably wrong and what’s right is probably right. Those will more experience should be more able to trust their instincts to make decision. Equally those with less experience will have valid opinions too – so seek the opinions of others to test and challenge your own thinking.

3. If in doubt, sleep on it. There must be a Darwinian explanation why decisions always come better in the morning after a good nights sleep, but they do.

For more insights and ideas on creativity and problem solving read chapter 21 of The Marketing Director’s Handbook.

3D TV At Home – Honey, You Cannot Be Serious?

The Polar Express (2004) Click to view 2D trailer

Imagine riding a roller coaster.  That’s how viewing The Polar Express on a 3D cinema screen felt as the train sped through gorges and swayed over mountains enroute to the North Pole.  And hear the screams and feel the fear as several hundred rats surge over the edge of a stage and towards you in Disney theme park’s showing of Honey, I Shrunk the Audience.

Will 3DTV be a heart pounding experience like 3D cinema?

We’ll find out sooner than you might think. Despite the fact that the UK tv landcape won’t be fully digitised until 2012, 3D tv trials are already taking place in the UK, Japan and Brazil (amongst others) with a view to a UK launch from Spring 2010.

From a marketing stand-point, as with most technological advances the challenge is to ensure that the audience experience is distinctive, compelling, affordable and easily accessible. Then communicate this to drive audience purchase and usage. To do this the technology,  content and cost issues and the audience drivers and barriers need to be understood and used to create effective marketing or brand communications.

What are the potential barriers and drivers?

1. Wearing nerdy glasses : Stereoscopy is the most widely accepted method for recording and delivering 3D video. This requires capturing stereo images in the right place to show convincing scene depth on a screen. The images then need to be coded for broadcast and viewing. In the UK, Sky is experimenting using alternate lines of pixels for transmission. These need to be viewed on purpose built 3D televisions. Initially, and at the lowest cost end of the spectum, polarised glasses will be needed to view the images.

3D television - the technical bit simplified

2. Ease of acquisition : How available or expensive will the equipment be?  In the UK, Sky’s aim is to use the existing HD infrastructure which means that there will be an immediate 1.6m+ homes (Oct 2009) that already have compatible set-top boxes. New 3D compatible tvs will be also be required and several manufacturers have  started producing such sets. Ultimately, sets with autostereoscopic displays will obviate the need for glasses.  Inevitably these will be higher cost.

3. Risk of technology redundancy : Will the technology go out of date?  The answer is more likely to be when not will. First stage tv sets are likely to require users to wear glasses before autostereoscopic screens become available. In addition, 3D blu-ray and 3D tv broadcasts are likely to use different technologies. This means that standardisation or multiple technologies will needed within tv receivers to allow both blu-ray dvds and tv broadcasts to be viewed on the same tv. While this may not be an issue for early adopters it will be a concern to attract the masses.

4. Safety : Watching 3D movies can make your stomach churn so some may have health concerns. No doubt this will have implications for audience trials and some warnings, guidelines and checks and balances may be needed to allay fears and manage potential issues.

5. Ease of use : The more complicated the system is to operate or view the greater the barrier to usage will be. The challenge will be to make the equioment easy-to-use and fool-proof and enable usage without significant modifications to normal viewing behaviour, for example to ensure that the tv screen can be watched from all angles.

6. Experiential benefits : The acid test will be the quality of the experience versus the cost. Initial noises sound positive. In the UK, chief broadcast engineer at BSkyB, Chris Johns suggests that 3D could herald a step change in the same way that colour did versus black and white.  Offering features that don’t deliver visible benefits and tangible better value will be a recipe for failure. Surely the equipment manufacturers, film, tv and game production companies and broadcasters will have learned this lesson. The demise of Betamax and the original BSB digital broadcasting company is testimony that ‘quality’ alone does not necessarily ’sell’.

An equally big challenge lies with the content producers. Film or programme quality will be all. Watching a newsreader in 3D is unlikely to be as compelling as ducking out of the way when a football comes hurtling towards you.

The challenge will also be to identify which other genres and experiences will work well in 3D and draw audiences. Inevitably there will also be limitations – perhaps to the number of times that some want to ride a roller coaster!

Marketing Inspiration

Start thinking about your 3D advertisements now. There will be extra profile and impact for the first movers!

Branding – it’s all about personality – stupid!

In increasingly competitive markets, standing out from the crowd is not just a question of what you say but how you say it.

Line up a row of unbranded beers on the bar; how many of us can really tell the difference based on taste? And how many of us can really name the brand? Very few and even fewer I suspect. All of this goes to demonstrate the importance of brand positioning and communication. While beers do offer different benefits such as sociability and refreshment, the range of possible benefits is still relatively limited. This makes it hard to  stand-out via the benefit message alone.  Yet, there are an infinite number of ways of expressing the benefit message. For example, though humour, being street-wise, down-to earth, or authoritative.  These highlight the importance of tone of voice or personality in communication.

Let’s look at another way. What do you look for in a partner, a mate? In addition to the physical attributes it mostly comes down to personality.  Beyond the flippant, “And Mrs. Daniels, what attracted you to the multi-millionaire Paul?” what really attracted you to your partner?  Most likely the answer will be a very specific and distinctive combination personality traits.

So if products are people, then brands are friends or lovers, we must search for and express, a distinctive combination of personality traits to define brands. We should also therefore consider all aspects of a human personality. What do brands believe, how do they behave and how do they communicate?

As in humans, the range of personality traits is almost infinite

Pick a personality yourself to project and start to appreciate the palette of variables; Spiderman – young, flawed and broody, a superhero; Ruby Wax in Comic Relief does Fame Academy (self deprecating, game-on for a good cause, tone deaf, comedienne); Fagin (in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist) disgusting, thief, teacher, miser, Jewish, carer ……

Spiderman played by Tobey Maguire

Ruby Wax singing in Fame Academy

Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist

Brandcepts expressing different messages and personality traits

Coca-Cola

Comparethemarket.com

Nike

By creating communication stimulus that expresses not just what to say but how to say it, and using the stimulus in a research situation, consumers can be provoked, engaged, and potentially excited by both the messages and tone of voice.

So how to do that? We use a technique that we call brandcepts.  Brandcepts are like advertisements, mini press ads; as such they are instantly recognisable and comprehensible.

This is a powerful technique because it allows the creation and exploration of a vast number of communication or positioning variables including both rational and emotional benefit messages and style and tone of communication. In turn these can reflect a multitude of personality traits and be used to push brand boundaries.

By analysing what drives appeal and stand-out, the messages and tone of voice can be decoded to provide a positioning blue-print to enable brands to truly cut-through and engage.

Blue-prints  include visual and language frameworks that can be easily acted upon by communication teams and product developers. They can also depend on the analytical techniques used. For example, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator helps analyse personality types in terms of four pairs of dichotomies such as thinking – feeling and extraversion – introversion. Archetypes, originally advanced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung provide another construct. Jung originally identified five archetypes including the Anima (feminine image in a man’s psyche), Animus (the masculine image in a woman’s psyche) and the Shadow (the opposite of the ego image). Archetypes have been present in folklore and literature for thousands of years and are thus relatively easily recognised. Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson expanded on Jung’s range of archetypes in their 2001 book – The Hero and the Outlaw – Building Extraordinary Brands through the Power of Archetypes. Archetypes can be powerful revealing new ideas to help brands challenge category conventions, stand-out and reconnect with consumers.

MARKETING INSPIRATION

Make sure a distinctive brand personality is at the heart of your brand positioning. It can provide insight and clarity to enable more effective communications and relationship building through all encounters that customers have with your brand. If you are #2 or #3 in a category it could transform your brand and help it get and stay ahead.

To help you start to appreciate the power of personality, try to define the personalities of the brands in the ads shown above. There are no prizes, just self-satisfaction. These are prominent brands so the challenge should not be difficult. Our ideas are at the bottom of the page.

Read more about how The Marketing Directors’ brand positioning and communication tools could help set your brand apart.

Our Answers!

Coca-Cola:  Always fashionable (everyone’s icon)

Comparethemarket.com: Intelligent, irreverent, to the point (a matey teacher)

Nike: Confident, controlled aggression (a winner)

Well done! Now how easy is it to define the personality of your brand?

To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Is that Your Question?

Twitter - the name is derived from the chirping of birds

Since beginning as a social experiment in 2006, Twitter is the fastest growing social media site with over 54m users. This compares with Facebook’s 300m and MySpace’s 90m. Twitterers include most media companies, for example, CNN, the BBC, the Guardian and the marketing press. A red carpet full of celebrities; Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) has the largest following (3.6m), politicians; Barack Obama has 2.2m followers and c. 100 MPs. Businesses are also present in various guises. As corporates, for example Starbucks, Cadbury and Waterstones. As brands, CadburyDairyMilk (@GoneFairtrade) and @Cadbury_ Gorilla and as channels or offers, for example, Dell (@delloutlet – 1.2m).

Despite having entered mainstream consciousness, a recent survey suggested that 55% of marketers are unaware of twitter.com or find it serves no purpose. So should you join the twitterverse or not?

What are the business benefits?

Here’s a summary of offensive and defensive benefits that twitter can provide:

New promotion vehicle: Twitter allows both mass and individual customer (or follower) communication and engagement to the web and mobile devices. It can also amplify your social media messages as it integrates with platforms such as Facebook.

More customer reach: Twitter’s more open nature is a plus to reach new markets. Most will attract a very internationally diverse audience and in contrast with Facebook and My Space, three quarters of users are over 25.

More engaging messages: The short nature of messages is more casual and less corporate thus removing a barrier that many consumers see in engaging with businesses. As Vance Packard said ‘the medium is the message’. The mobile nature of the medium also enables live messaging, for example, live news and information sharing from events, product launches, presentations etc.

Brand enhancement: Brand stand-out, value and credibility can be enhanced through innovative content, for example, humour and thought leading ideas. During the Wimbledon tournament, @andy_murray promoted a tennis player snack game (John MacEnrolo, Martina Haggis). This did wonders to soften his image!

Search engine enhancement: Twitter can be searched by Google etc. which means that it can play a key part in your website SEO strategy. Our experience is that 20% of traffic to our marketing consultancy website comes from clicking on our url on twitter.

New sales channel: Twitter works like an add-on to the web. By embedding links into tweets, followers (and the Internet population at large) can be directed to your website. Either to collect names for direct marketing or enable direct sales. Dell, for example, has over 80 corporate twitter accounts and promotes a number of ‘unique to twitter’ offers.

Competitor and trend monitoring: Twitter can form part of your corporate early warning radar system to help spot opportunities and threats. Some companies only appear to follow competitors, for example, Cadbury follows other chocolate firms.

Customer relationship building: To follow you is to get to know you, and potentially like, trust and buy from you. It lends itself to both casual mass communication and personal communication with specific individuals. It can be used to answer questions and enter into dialogue. As Dell has discovered it can turn detractors into friends such that its employees are now encouraged to open accounts.

Customer research: The research department will also find it useful to ask your customers questions, monitor brand mentions, identify trending topics and analyse your own followers (www. tweepler.com)

Job hunting: There are lots of employment agencies out there!

Any disbenefits?

Creative challenge: The main downside is that messages have to be encapsulated in 140 characters and this includes links. On the upside this should force brevity and clarity!

Commercial models: While there are lots of good practices, the rules for making money using twitter are still evolving. The marketing rules however remain the same as they did at the time of the dot com boom. Insight and ingenuity are both required.

Management time: Time is the key requirement to devise and implement effective twitter strategies. Other than that investment levels can be virtually zero. In addition, as with the web, there will always be time wasters and spammers. These issues can easily distract or overwhelm but can be dealt with through simple technology fixes, such as anti-spam or human verification and automation software.

Unofficial brands: The seeming lack of regulation on twitter means that there is a risk of unofficial twitterers occupying your turf – so aim to mark and protect your brand!

Marketing Inspiration: This new communications medium could be a boon to both the marketing and research department. The barriers to entry are low and the upside potential could be huge.

1. Messaging and commercial strategy; Think carefully about content and the personality that you want to show – this is a differentiator and vital to engage. You can also think big or small. Twitter is ripe for new business models and some of the world’s hottest news stories start here.

2. Targeting; Think carefully about who you want to target, and define your target using keywords. Following your competitors is a good place to start….

3. Then just open an account, watch, learn and experiment….

Follow us at twitter.com/themarketingdir or twitter.com/tmarketresearch and we’ll follow you back! We’re happy to tweet to you to help you find your way! For strategic advice or implementation assistance to set-up and manage accounts get in touch.

A License to Thrill – New Tools For Product Innovation and Brand Licensing

There is widespread recognition amongst tv producers that income from tv programme sales is seldom sufficient to cover production costs. So brand licensing is rightly centre stage as a means to increase revenue and extend intellectual properties beyond the tv screen. But to truly extend and set your offer apart, new consumer driven and brand tools are needed.

The Current Model is Flawed

The process is typically an auction. A producer makes a show. It’s then sold to broadcasters and aired. A ‘style guide’ is produced containing a synopsis of the show, the key characters and design elements. It’s usually an impressive tome, a wonderful work of art, and often produced at massive expense. This is sent to potential licensees with a brief asking them to come up with new product ideas. The product rights are then effectively sold to the highest bidder.

Label Slapping Risks Undermining Value

But the current model often leads to little more putting a new tv series label on a product. While there are a few bucks to be made by slapping tv series logos onto a pair of pyjamas, pencil case or rucksack rarely will this add much in terms of value and support for the tv series. Sure the tv series linkage will contribute some recognition and interest but rarely will it truly differentiate. More often it will limit competitiveness to the commodities that can be found in cheap and cheerful stores. Further, it can undermine the tv proposition if the product or place is inappropriate.

Out-Smart Your Competitors

Thinking from a supply push point of view alone isn’t enough. It’s akin to throwing mud at a wall – an uncertain way to make it stick.

Everyone is a potential competitor for your consumer’s time and money so be vigilant to the world around you. Competitive media and retailers, and particularly consumer goods companies are amongst the most sophisticated product development organisations in the world. By learning from and out-thinking your competitors will improve the chances that what you offer will truly resonate.

Invest in Getting Genuine and Timely Insights

So don’t just run internal creative workshops, invest in obtaining genuine consumer understanding on which to base decisions.

Consumers make choices based on their individual needs, whether an offer meets their needs, and by weighing up the benefits of competing offers. They buy if their needs become wants.  The trade makes stocking decisions on a similar basis – what sets them apart, drives store traffic and meets their customer’s needs.

Invest in audience research to understand what it is that engages and sets your tv series apart.  What engages and enthrals is rarely what it appears from the outside looking in. Often unusual character quirks are uncovered which can highlight previously unconsidered differentiators and drivers. For example, the lead characters could be different to what had previously been assumed. All can have a profound bearing on your licensing programme.

Invest in obtaining meaningful insights on consumers’ needs, wants and behaviours. Think about this at the same time as programme production rather than afterwards to maximise both programme development and brand extension opportunities. And as insights can come from anywhere it is important to look in many places and use a variety of techniques to uncover them.

Create Stimulus to Explore and Define the Brand Difference

Product stimulus for The Secret Show

Product stimulus for The Secret Show

Product stimulus for The Fluffy Bunny Show

Stimulus can be used to challenge, engage, amuse and explore new product and communication possibilities. Creating and bring to life ideas (see examples above) helps provoke more substantial reactions to ideas, push the boundaries where products and brands can go and uncover what is appealing and why.

It moves the conversation beyond the superficial ‘because it’s good’ to enable the precise combination of rational and emotional drivers that prompt interest and demand to be understood. It enables the ‘magic’ of the brand; the detailed proposition that products and services must offer consumers to truly stand-out and command a premium over all comers, to be defined. This proposition can then be hard-wired into ‘style guides’ to provide a robust plan to deliver the return on investment you need.

There are particular difficulties in conducting practical and useful research with young consumers. Children are understandably less articulate than adults and need help to express themselves. This is where stimulus can play an even more powerful role to help critique and develop ideas.

The examples of product stimulus visualised are reproduced courtesy of BBC Worldwide. They are just a handful of some 70 plus ideas created and used to explore new product and brand extension opportunities for The Secret Show.

Marketing Inspiration: Extending programmes beyond the tv screen to create brands requires the differentiating essence of the programme to be truly understood. This will only happen by seeing through the audience’s eyes and pushing the boundaries creatively.

Expert Marketing Strategies – Focus on your Niche

Expert marketing strategies - Focus on your niche

Growing through tough times is concern to most businesses.  Click on the tv screen to find out how companies can reach more of the right kinds of customer whatever the economic conditions.  This short feature has been recorded by Your Business Channel.

Successful Marketing Part 6 – The Devil is in the Detail

Marks and Spencer boobed by charging extra for larger bras but helped restore their reputation by fessing up

The devil is in the marketing implementation detail

In highly competitive markets, both strategy and execution can make a big difference to the results.  Within your business, a misplaced or poorly articulated word in a strategy can lead to misinterpretation and cause confusion.  From the customer stand-point, a misplaced or poorly articulated word on a product or in an advertisement can inhibit response and waste a lot of money. This is particularly the case in markets where companies follow similar strategies or offer similar benefits. Conversely, a well-placed or well-chosen word can help cut-through and connect, thereby boosting demand.   So establish processes, tools and techniques to ensure that both strategic and executional decisions are of the highest order.

Overcoming perceptions that marketing is ‘fluffy’ is often an inter-related challenge. Master and use analytical tools and techniques to help you marshal and present your arguments in a simple and easy-to-understand manner. Not only can these distil complexity into simple messages but also give added rigor and impact to your arguments. A spreadsheet model will also be helpful to justify the ROI. A number of useful tools and techniques are described in The Marketing Director’s Handbook.

Your own motivation, drive and rigor in seeking and enforcing marketing excellence will also help overcome any negative attitudes to marketing amongst your colleagues. Another way to seek excellence is to embrace new technology as this may create new opportunities in itself. However bear in mind that using new technology may mean even shorter planning cycles so clever anticipation and preplanning is required. For example, while digital technology can reduce promotion origination and reproduction costs you will need to be more vigilant in maintaining and using a database to ensure effective targeting.

The Marketing Director’s Handbook has been acclaimed as a book that all directors should read and that all marketing directors should keep close to hand.

© 2009 The Marketing Directors

Restoring Business Growth

Restoring business growth

In the current economic climate, the news is full of businesses that are suffering and jobs that are being lost. Particularly in tough times, but often on an ongoing basis, the marketing director will have to turn around a poorly performing brand or business. But how? There are three steps to transforming an under-performing business.

1. Understand the effect on your business

First, understand the effect on your business or portfolio as a whole. How significant or material is the effect in relation to the business as a whole? If it is small then delegate responsibility to solve the problem, if large, then there is a case for you to invest more of your own time.

2. Diagnose the problem

Then diagnose the cause as quickly as possible. Ask questions and form your own opinion of the cause and the ability of your team to solve the problem. The scale, complexity, political sensitivities of the problem will affect the ability of your own team to develop a solution. Using consultants and conducting original customer research can be helpful in being both objective and apolitical.

Is the problem a one-off, recurring or ongoing?

Is the problem caused by an internal operational issue or external market forces?

Is the problem product, promotion or strategy related?

Is it people or process related?

What plans do we have to deal with the issue?

3. Drive change

When you fully understand the issues and have a plan in place then drive change. Here your approach must depend on the effect of the business problem and the ability of your team to solve the problem. If the problem is less significant, a lighter touch may be appropriate. If the problem is material, you will need to be more directive. Throughout check that the problem is understood, and to corroborate this is the case, ask for a paper discussing the issue as well as recommending options to deal with it. Then drive action. If the problem reaches across departments, set-up a task force to deal with it and ensure clear access to relevant senior management. If the problem is beyond the capability or experience of your current managers, strengthen the team or replace the key people.

For a more detailed discussion on how to restore growth check out Chapter 22 of The Marketing Director’s Handbookor give us  a call.

© 2009 The Marketing Directors

Successful Marketing Part 5 – Why Bother with Brands?

Benefits of Brands

Why you should bother with brands

The role of the marketing director and his/her department is to create and define what it is distinctive and appealing to customers about an organisation and its products and services.  It is about creating distinctive value propositions for which customers will shell out more of their hard-earned money. It is about creating and building brands. Underlying this challenge is a need to understand and nurture the strengths ie assets or skills of the organisation – to reinforce a positive and distinctive impression in the customers’ minds. This requires rigorous examination, insight and analysis to understand what strengths can set the organisation apart and can be nurtured to deliver extra value.

Much is written about brands and most ignore or misunderstand the difference between a simply named products and the brand. For those who work for corporates, that’s where the marketer’s challenge often starts – with helping people understand ‘what brand means’ and ‘why bother’.

There are lots of reasons to bother; to simplify and drive customer choice and purchase, add value (brands command premiums), to provide a vehicle for uniting organisational hearts and minds, be a change culture vehicle (most relevant for service organisations) and of course, enhance shareholder value.

The management function to maximise the stand-out, and appeal of the brand is the domain of the marketer. So often in service companies, the good work of an advert in raising expectations is undermined by a surly customer service representative. So effective management of the customer or brand experience, the touch-points or encounters that the organisation has with its customers, is required. In some businesses, the range of touch-points or brand encounters can be vast and putting service at the heart of the experience is just one step on the way to achieving stand-out.

Exerting influence over these touch-points usually requires influence over many areas in the organisation that are not controlled by the marketing department. These areas may be customer facing, such as customer services, or internal such as Human Resources or finance. To bring about change in these areas will require strong communication, influencing and managing skills. You will need to build strong relationships with colleagues to win their support to help you. For example, through the HR team, you will be able to influence employee communications, the content of job objectives, job performance reviews and reward and remuneration packages.

Exerting influence over other customer-facing functions is unlikely to be an easy task. The marketing graveyard is littered with the remains of marketers who tried and failed. As well as using charm and persuasion, use your marketing technical skills to obtain hard data to support your arguments. Use research to understand how consumers perceive the touch-points, what are their expectations and if there is a shortfall between expectation and delivery. Also understand what drives or inhibits demand and loyalty and would ensure an excellent customer experience.

Find out more about The Marketing Directors’ brand positioning services and read about brand management and positioning in chapter 16 of The Marketing Director’s Handbook.

© The Marketing Directors 2009

Successful Marketing Part 4 – Measure and Manage the Numbers

Measure and Manage the Numbers

Making money is what a company is all about and it is where marketing makes its most important contribution. Only marketing directly fuels growth. Other board functions fuel efficiency so combining both leads to more profit. It is in achieving and beating profit forecasts that the whole board will be measured upon. That means that all marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) must be profit related.

Shareholders require better returns than they would otherwise be able to get from putting their money in a building society. Total shareholders return (TSR) is the combination of capital growth in the value of the share, plus the dividend yield (the amount of profit paid back to shareholders in return for lending their capital to a business). As a benchmark and target to aim for, the most successful organisations deliver returns in excess of 20%.

Measuring, making marketing decisions on and delivering economic profit (profit after tax, less a charge for the capital tied up in the business) should be at the forefront of what you do. This is a concept invented by British economist Alfred Marshall. If these measures don’t exist you will need to institute them.

Successful profit management also requires a strong commercial awareness and commercial leadership skills. You will need to be a crystal ball gazer, and streetwise to where profitable opportunities lie in the marketplace and how to realise them. It also requires a close relationship with the chief executive and the financial director. To ensure influence, those relationships must be based on respect and speaking the same commercial and financial language. It is here that the marketing plan and activities must be aligned to the targets set by the business as a whole. The marketing plan should also be continuously updated showing what you are spending, what is committed and what is left. Understanding and managing the budgetary variances will contribute directly to profit at year end. So always know where you are and aim to give some of your budget back!

Read more about measuring marketing performance in chapter 5 of The Marketing Director’s Handbook.

© The Marketing Directors 2009