PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

In recessionary times (see under GE, Earnings Statement, 4.11.08), companies nearly always become more conservative about the value of marketing. That’s no surprise, though I’m still taken aback, working through my third economic downturn in this industry, at how quickly the winds shift. Just yesterday I heard about a client whose $10 million marketing budget had, in the course of five months, been whittled down to just north of $900,000 at the lower edge of the range.

So is marketing an investment or a line item expense, and what business problems can it solve? Local academic marketing programs often ask someone from PJA to come in and present the BtoB perspective on these eternal questions (see under John Wanamaker, advertising budget, which half is wasted), and though these are basic tenets of marketing, it never hurts to be reminded during an economic period when business common sense is often the first thing to suffer.

Here’s the list our head of interactive plans to present at an upcoming marketing class in a lecture hall near you: (more…)

As much as I admire and like a lot of industry analysts we talk to (we’re actually a Gartner customer: makes me feel wistful that some of these people get to think about one industry niche 24 x 7 x 365), there’s always a Cassandra-like note in their reports, not unlike a Tom Peters book. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t undertake these 11 priorities this quarter and reinvent your business process platform by end of year, you’ll be seriously behind your competitors or pushing up the daisies. Et cetera.”

Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”

As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”

All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it). (more…)

Our friends at Cymfony, now TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony (proving a theory of mine that all CGM companies will ultimately be acquired) have just released a new survey of 60 marketers at companies in North America, France, and the U.K.. The report concludes that when it comes to social media, marketing agencies are “ill equipped,” to quote AdWeek and “don’t get it,” to quote the survey report.

The report brings back the words of an AT&T executive who is a “friend of the agency,” as the saying goes. In essence, she said that “agencies talk a good game about integrating print and online, but I’ve been hearing it for years and I just don’t see it.” Well, she used more PG-13 language than that, but you hear the same kind of frustration as we’re now hearing about social media.

Although BtoB has traditionally lagged consumer markets in marketing innovation, we find that social media provides a great opportunity to step out and “punch above your weight,” since larger companies tend to arrive at the party later. Of course, there are a few ground rules to be laid down after, to quote Jim Nail from Cymfony, we “put up a good presentation about what social media is.” In no particular order, these are: (more…)

I’m happy to announce that we have just completed our first research study with BioInformatics, LLC, a PJA research partner with an online forum of more than 30,000 scientists.

The study topic? Life scientists and social media.

And what did we find? More than I expected, certainly. Here are some of the highlights: (more…)

My most recent inquiry shows that 30-second spots at the 2008 Super Bowl will run you about $2.7 million, up 4 percent from $2.6 million last year.

Coincidentally, $2.7 million represents the entire marketing budget for some of our B2B clients. Granted, if you don’t sell cars, beer, automobiles, movies, lingerie or mixed nuts, it’s probably not the best place to blow that budget.

Of course, the possibility of doing a Super Bowl ad is invariably tossed around in B2B marketing meetings as the ultimate dream: nearly 100,000,000 sets of eyeballs on your ad, especially if it airs in the first half, and all that follow-on Web activity as people make a mental note to / actually visit your site.

But let’s say that price tag is a bit steep. What can all we non-participants learn from the best features of the best Super Bowl ads, versus blowing off a lot of steam the morning after on which ones were the most effective? Here are a few ideas:

(more…)