This Henry Ford quote is a great reminder to marketers as we begin the New Year. Time keeps marching on, and no one has figured out how to stop it. There’s a world of time-saving ideas out there, but stopping a clock isn’t one of them. As marketers, we should remind those who control the purse strings that we can’t stop advertising to save money. That would simply be counterproductive.
My brother shared a story with me not long ago, and it was about a radio salesman who used to call on him at his furniture store back in the late 80s. He always remembered one thing about this gentleman. He had a business card, and while he can’t recall the exact words it contained on the back of the card, he thinks it read something like this:
You wake up in the morning and drink your Folgers and eat your Cheerios. Then you brush your teeth with Colgate and wash it down with Listerine. You put on your Rockport shoes and Arrow button-down shirt and latch your Rooster tie. Then you hop in your Chevrolet Monte Carlo to drive to work while you smoke your Camels. All while you ponder… does advertising really work?
If you think it’s wise to stop advertising to save money, and the above story doesn’t call you back to reality, then allow us to point out some problems that arise when you stop marketing:
- Loss of revenue/new customer transactions — This is the most obvious and most immediate impact you will feel. In this day and age, where transactions are measured by the second, it won’t take long for your organization to feel a decrease in new customer acquisition. So, does it make sense to stop advertising to save money when, in fact, your revenue takes a hit? Spending less on marketing equates to making less for your bottom line.
- Loss of brand awareness/long-term value — We call this the double-whammy. You’ve already lost immediate revenue sources based on the first problem, and now the long-term consequences start stacking up. One ad industry talking head indicated that when you stop advertising, it takes two years of advertising to recover to the same brand awareness level you enjoyed prior to discontinuing your marketing efforts.
- Loss of market share/competitive advantage — This problem is the worst in our opinion, because you have opened the door for a competitor to jump in and steal market share. Once you lose market share, the only way to gain it back is to have a competitor make the same mistake of halting advertising to save money. And typically, companies only stop advertising to save money during recessions, and who really wants to wish for a recession just to regain market share?!?
These are the big three. And while focusing on the negative might scare you back to reality, let’s consider more positive ways to allocate your marketing spend versus the decision to stop advertising to save money.
- Improve your advertising — Our #1 tip is because we’re the nation’s #1 positioning ad agency. We see so much marketing that fails to establish and build a focused idea in the mind. It’s wasted dollars. Instead of building one idea in the mind, most marketers try to advertise multiple messages that simply create their own clutter. We’re not shy about pointing this out, so if your advertising needs some focus, contact us.
- Add emotion to your brand — Boring marketing is bad business. While we fully advocate ads with one focused idea, we don’t propose boring ads to do so. The more an ad can break the ho-hum and grab a prospect to gain attention, the more likely your single idea will make an impression in the mind. Consider this: why do insurance companies use comedy in their ads? To get your attention. The gecko, the duck, the emu, the Statue of Liberty, Jake, Flo, and even one messaging that they have no jingles or mascots. Insurance is a boring business. Insurance advertising is comedic, zany, and oftentimes, annoying. And you pay attention to it because it’s usually entertaining. My guess is you can put a brand name to every single reference noted above. That’s because they have made some sort of emotional connection in your brain.
- Add PR — Public Relations is THE best way to build a brand and one of the most monetarily efficient. Period. Full stop. If you need convincing of this, read one of our past PositionistViews® about how to build an economic “moat.”
- Optimize your media — We see it too frequently: bad media plans or poorly executed ones. For example, I was watching TV the other night, and the same ad ran three times in a row across multiple commercial breaks. Within the entire one-hour episode, the ad ran at least 20 times. That’s an example of a CTV media buy where the media planners failed to cap frequency. The result? I’m already tired of that brand. It went from awareness to brand fatigue in a matter of one hour. Or, consider a plan where a small budget uses a dozen different media, and no one channel is used sufficiently to gain true traction or analytics. This is called spreading your resources too thinly. Optimizing your media means using your limited resources in a way that will change the outcome of your sales. Which leads to our final tip…
- Connect advertising results to your sales — If you can’t connect your marketing to data-driven or at least anecdotal evidence to your sales, then your marketing program needs some tweaking. You should broadly be aware of which channels are working well together and how brand advertising impacts those sales. This requires some tedious work to achieve, but don’t give up on connecting as many dots as you can. Again, our shameless plug … contact us if you need assistance in achieving this.
As you begin your new year, we wish you the very best in your life and in your marketing! We all need reminders of things we take for granted, and hopefully, you have no one in your organization suggesting that you stop advertising to save money. If so, point them to this article! In the meantime, may your new year marketing efforts be as great as they’ve ever been. Happy New Year!