I was astonished to read that Deloitte’s marketing director Nigel Pyke believes that two million pounds spent on a national advertising campaign was money well spent:
‘External reaction has been positive; those that had seen the advertising were 22% more likely to consider using Deloitte services in the future than those who had not,’ he writes in this month’s Professional Marketing magazine.
Pyke also identifies another success that has resulted from the campaign, which saw the firm take over the entire advertising space around the IMAX cinema neat Waterloo station in London.
‘Internally, the campaign has created a great buzz amongst our people receiving positive feedback and a thirst for more, with 86% saying they would like to see Deloitte invest in further advertising,’ he says.
Duh? Well it’s not quite that simple. During the campaign, Deloitte went on an internal charm offensive designed to make staff aware of what was going on. It is therefore hardly surprising to see the results claimed. But…does this translate into increased client acquisition or additional work? Those questions remain unanswered. ‘More likely to consider’ doesn’t cut it for me. Which brings me neatly to the title of this post.
John Dodds recently wrote an interesting post on marketing where he says:
Marketing is not an expense, it’s an investment cost that is inherent in the creation of your product/service from development through promotion and distribution and on to the sales experience and post-sales service. That’s a subtle accounting distinction but a crucial one. The price you pay for not understanding marketing is much worse than mediocre products – it’s commercial extinction.
This is something with which many businesses struggle. They think that by pushing messages out to the world in the form of advertising copy, they will in some way magically attract business. It doesn’t happen. At least most of the time.
Hugh MacLeod has proven that by adopting smarter ways of engaging with people, you can do a lot more with limited budgets. In his Stormhoek campaign,
Hugh showed that tying a commodity product to an unorthodox method of communication could yield spectacular results. He showed that by getting a tailor to talk about the industry in an interesting and engaging fashion, sales could be improved to the point where Thomas Mahon’s order book is full well into the future.
The same principles Hugh expounds can be applied to the profession. They’re simple, direct and have genuine impact. It helps if you have a big foghorn like Hugh’s with which to amplify the message but then for most professionals, getting local attention is good enough. We have the tools, we only need the ingenuity and courage to go out there and say something both compelling and different.
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