A new report confirms media agency staff are nothing like the consumers they serve, but the bigger question is whether they and marketers are market-orientated enough to know this and let customer insight guide them.
Superbrands’ bogus methodology regularly turns up inexplicable and nonsensical ‘findings’. Here are my top 10 aberrations from this year’s Superbrands Consumer Top 20 ranking.
Psychographic segmentation has been out of favour for a while despite its obvious usefulness, but combining it with behavioural and addressable data creates a potent mix that could make targeting supremely effective.
Even if we smack our heads in frustration when consumers make stupid choices, there’s nothing worse than a marketer who wastes money ‘educating’ a market. Customers’ perceptions must become your reality.
Marketers can learn from the approach of Spectre director Sam Mendes – make time for the market, don’t rely on quant data and experience what your customers experience.
Once again CoolBrands has released its list of the ‘coolest brands’ in the UK and once again marketers should hang their heads in shame – and once again our branding correspondent loses the plot.
In an age of big data and real-time marketing it’s important for brand managers to remember that the best insights usually come from one person – the brand’s founder.
I have a client who I work for each year helping to run their global marketing training. We send 700 executives a super-sexy iPad Mini at the start of the year, which has uploaded on it case studies, readings and simulations that we will use to train them during the year.
I have a very good friend, Tony, who runs an abattoir. He’s from farming stock and, in a decision driven as much by his head as his heart, bought the small local abattoir before it went bust and left hundreds of smallholders unable to butcher their livestock without long transportation journeys that would have made their animals uncomfortable and their slaughter uneconomic.
With three weeks to go before the general election, the media seems to have gone politically bonkers. You can’t turn a page or switch on the TV without an immediate update on the upcoming election. Marketers are not exempt from all this either.
Of all the concepts in the marketing universe, the most important gift we give our organisations is market orientation. It’s the omega of our discipline because it challenges a manager to recognise the fundamental truth that a) consumers are the source of a company’s success, but that b) these consumers inevitably see the world very differently from the employees that work within the company and who devise the strategies aimed at those consumers.
Of all the academic research published, the most intriguing and entertaining has always been by public health researchers on driving impairment. Since the 1950s, researchers have paid undergraduate ‘subjects’ (who will do almost anything for free booze) to drive round a test circuit, drink three large glasses of wine and then redo the task. A generation of students have confirmed the finding that when people are slightly drunk they don’t drive very well.
Tom Fishburne is founder of Marketoon Studios. Follow his work at marketoonist.com or on Twitter @tomfishburne See more of the Marketoonist here
Marketers want a positive, do-good brand purpose but if they do harm before doing good, all integrity will be lost and brand purpose will go straight out the window.
Award-winning columnist Edwards will be writing a monthly column for Marketing Week, as well as speaking at the Festival of Marketing in October.
BT and EE are scraping separate marketing chief roles in favour of one position that will report into BT Consumer CEO Marc Allera as they look to “make the most of both the brands”.
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