Investment vs spend and category challenges: Your Marketing Week
At the end of every week, we look at the key stories, offering our view on what they mean for you and the industry. From Next’s CEO swapping investment for spend when talking about marketing to Kraft Heinz’s top marketers asserting that ownership of all four Ps is the only way to “solve big challenges”, it’s been a busy week. Here is my take.
Next steps
One of the most revealing sentences about marketing I have heard from a CEO was offered yesterday by Next chief executive Lord Wolfson.
While stating it expected marketing spend to increase as a percentage of sales in the second half of its financial year, with the bulk going on “new and developing channels”, Lord Wolfson said: “Whether or not we invest, I shouldn’t say invest… whether or not we spend on marketing depends entirely on the returns that we get on that marketing. So, we never have any other objective other than profitable growth on our sales. We would never spend money on marketing just to grow sales if it wasn’t profitable.”
