tJP

An interesting view of the world from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Reduce your marketing spend to zero for 1 year and brand recovery will take 5 years. Reduce by 50% for 1 year and it will take 3 years to recover.

Don’t you sometimes appreciate the common sense that comes out of the big brains at McKinsey? Like the December 08 marketing article “The downturn’s new rules for marketers”

 In essence the article talks about where to invest sales and marketing resources. The key WHERE points were:

• Look at geography - be it on a global, regional or micro region scale and work out who’s spending
• Look at consumer segments - the ‘priority’ for different categories has changed radically e.g. health, education and food will be cut less than other areas
• In B2B don’t just look at segments, but look at customers on 1 by 1 basis - reconsider the basis of how you do business.

The Key HOW points were

• Look at advertising and promotion - really understand cost per lead/reach etc
• Look at the sales function - not just the field sales staff but the complete sales value chain and gives examples of why cutting in the central support function may do more damage than good

Sometimes you just get a little surprised by how little information a company has. For example, met a company last week that is a huge intergalactic company, with one of their outlets found within every town and within 10km of every metro resident. Yet they did not know the size of the market - in broad terms they knew how much they sold of widget x, into what industries, but not the size of the market or the share their competitors  had. Not even to the point of knowing that the market was 10.2m widgets.

 At least they understand the limits of this, like they are unsure where to put effort to pickup share, or growth. Still a surprise!