PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Paul Nunes and Jeffery Merrihue score some great points in the new Sloan Management Review article “The Continuing Power of Mass Advertising” about the significant costs of a 1 to 1 marketing approach versus a mass audience approach in marketing. First and foremost, it costs a lot more to microtarget. You need CRM software packages, clean data and applications to make it cleaner, and the tools to personalize interactions. And unless your whole 1 to 1 strategy is closely tied to corporate strategy, forget it.

So yes, traditional advertising still a place in the marketing program, because it builds the higher awareness you need to get your messages associated with you, be perceived as a favorable brand, and win the coveted slot on the short list for sales presentations. MarketNorms Research from Dynamic Logic looked at more than 1 million data points and several desks worth of ad effectiveness studies to reach this conclusion, and it makes all kinds of sense.
While I can’t see the Sloan authors’ conclusions mapping to the complex B2B sale, and their thesis boils down to advertising to consumers in perceived low-value ‘bottleneck’ settings like coffee cups and paycheck stubs, escalators and elevators, and on new interactive posters and billboard units, they do make a valuable point. Not every audience is an audience of one, or needs to be marketed to in this way, and there are plenty of cross-over referral strategies to support traditional broad-based messaging for at least part of your program. And lest we forget, in these days of shrinking Wall Street Journal and Barron’s formats: print advertising in a lot of targeted publications is suddenly looking like a bargain again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 3:39 am and is filed under Advertising, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.