Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Thinking and Marketing

Thinking and Marketing

We grew up hearing “think before you act”, “think about it”, “think about what you say before you say it.”. Some people tend to “look before you leap”, “dive right in”, which I've personally had more success with, but I’ve found that in marketing the "thinker" marketing type isn't too successful. :  

Too many marketing consultants “think” they know what a consumer wants or they “think” they have a good marketing campaign to launch - with your money that is. I’d rather “know” I have something good before any company spends money on it. One recent example was a company I know of – a printing company who sells to individual printing sales houses. One agency came up with the brilliant sales slogan of, “Say I Do To Our Service” showing a picture of a bride and groom at a wedding. Hmmmm.....really? Maybe it's good?  It’s just plain gimmicky to me though. If I were a printer looking for a materials distributor would that get me? - Nope. I’d bet some bottom dollars that no research was done on this one whatsoever. No phone calls, surveys, just "bright ideas". So it comes down to a shot-in-the-dark creative process on the part of the marketing consultant.

What should have happened? First, they should have asked lots of questions. They should’ve asked about past clients, highest volumes of clients, where they were from, what industries, why they used them, why do they get referrals, what industries are using them more frequently over the years? Then maybe you can now get your “ah-ha” moment as a creative. 

Next, they should have done the market research. And as a side note, be careful with online and email surveys as you generally get one word answers. those are hard to work with. You've got to talk to people, ask the deeper questions, pull strings, get emotions, find out the things that one word answers won’t tell you. Now things will start to at least get interesting. 

When you start your creative process this way, your ROI is higher because your responses will be higher to your promo as you’re really saying something to them now. The creative process can now become very imaginative as actually realistic - not pie in the sky anymore.

So with the whole "thinking" thing, there’s not much thinking going on when you do what you should do in marketing. It is a lot of research, comparisons, data and investigating. 

So obviously thinking is what puts us higher on the food chain here on earth, but this is my insight into where in the creative process thinking should go.   

Sincerely,
Dan York

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