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. (more…)

If you’ve ever been in a position of running a large piece of business, you’re often called upon to put together a marketing plan and a letter of agreement, often to cover an entire year’s worth of activities. Having just drafted one over this weekend, with the help of colleagues on background during the week and a walk down Ogunquit Beach yesterday to put my thoughts in order, it’s gratifying how all the pieces sometimes come together. Whether or not the client signs on for the whole letter, it felt good to believe, based on three years’ experience together, that the plan this letter contains is really what this client should be doing. They should be listening to their research and giving every employee what they need to know about the company’s future. They should be making their brand more of a conversation and less of a monologue. They should be using social media, even if it amounts to the dipping of a few toes into that stream. They should create a lot of fanfare (and more importantly, a lot of consistency) around the new mission that they share. (more…)

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the Best (and Worst) Ads of ‘06. The author claimed that “marketers’ top priority is no longer selling but simply getting the public to watch an ad” is a completely legitimate observation that addresses our constant challenge of getting our clients heard through the clutter. We need to be entertainers as well as strategists in our approach.

As I nodded in tacit approval of the WSJ’s apparent good taste in advertising, I began to notice a trend in all of the winners: if each one wasn’t Web-based, it at least had an interactive component to the campaign, which in some cases required or encouraged audience participation. This is a significant step toward consumer generated media. These advertisers weren’t ceding control of the message, but they let their customers in on the fun.
Among them: (more…)