How effective is your marketing? (It still depends on what you’re measuring)
July 4th, 2007 by Hugh KennedyTwo articles in the July 9/16 BusinessWeek provide a welcome reminder that effectiveness measures are by no means absolute, and depend entirely on your goals. In the first piece Jon Fine provides an update on Project Apollo, a pilot test of radio and TV advertising effectiveness, and ACNielsen Homescan, which lets consumers scan product purchases into a database. The usual suspects (Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever) are funding the project, which has turned up early results that may significantly reduce marketing waste in ‘old media’ channels, especially among light users of products.
On the other hand is the article What Price Reputation?, which profiles Connecticut manufacturing conglomerate United Technologies and the way a good-old fashioned corporate print advertising campaign (how old media can you get?) has led to a 16% increase in its stock price since last year, which outpaces even competitor GE. UTC used Communications Consulting Worldwide to perform an analysis of thousands of articles, consumer brand perception studies, blog postings, employee and investor data. Their conclusion: 27% of UTC’s stock price was linked to intangibles like corporate image, so a corporate image campaign that emphasized its world-class manufacturing and green policies might lead to a nice measurable bump. Investment managers may disagree, but we’ve seen data from Barron’s and other publications that even at the corporate level, keeping the company visible, making credible claims that are grounded in reality, and speaking to the business’s unique competitive advantage all lead to higher consideration, greater investment and ultimately higher stock price. We’ve also seen measurable bumps in our own clients awareness and consideration thanks to a higher corporate profile.
Which may be a roundabout way of saying that although much marketing is noisy, platitude-driven capitalist pollution, highly targeted marketing with the right messages and the right measurement, online or offline, is still one of the best investments any company can make.