PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

The case study of marketing the Bahamas, a 600-mile-long string of 700 islands, offers several valuable lessons in marketing a network of businesses under one brand. This case study is also a chapter in Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage, by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn of star marketers Fallon Worldwide.

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Continuing the blog post cascade (Mike began with Advertising Shouldn’t be a Faith-Based Initiative, decrying the need for more metrics, then Hugh continued with the 37% Solution, giving us some concrete suggestions for making marketing more relevant and measurable), I’ll take the opportunity to look at what’s happening in measurement from the social media marketing world.

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My title refers to an interesting (but not surprising) statistic from High-Performance Marketing, a recent book by Naras Eechambadi of Eloqua: a Forrester study found that only 37% of executives considered their marketing organizations to be strategic and to deliver measurable value. This trend cuts across industries, but seems intensified in B2B. Marketing is where failed salespeople are sent out to pasture, where bored technologists get a second chance, where “marketing chicks” indulge their creative passions in colorful direct and collateral programs that deliver icy-cold leads to a sales force that summarily writes them off (the leads and the marketers). We’ve heard and seen them all. What’s worse, marketing does itself no favors by allocating its monies against a pre-set media mix rather than against customers and prospects, who’s adding profitability now and in the future. And so on.

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The inspiration for this post (and the post title) comes from a trio of Booz-Allen consultants who wrote The Future of Advertising is Now. In a world of continuous partial attention, it is hard to put anything new on your reading list, but please check this out. It is an incisive, well-written, and even inspiring piece about the sea change that is taking place in marketing accountability, thanks to the coming-of-age of interactive media. An excerpt (which serves almost as an executive summary of the article) from Rothenberg, Frelinghuysen, and Vollmer that I have been quoting madly: “the new media technologies, by drastically reducing production and distribution costs and making possible almost continual and instantaneous refinements in message, promise to increase the efficiency of accountable advertising…The spurious distinction between image advertising and retail advertising will erode, then disappear, as each advertisement, every product placement, all editorial can be tied to transactions”.

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