Research your next competitive marketing advantage!
How effective is your marketing? Are you growing market share, losing to competitors or treading water and drifting, asks Mike Rigby, CEO of MRA Research?
In the last 10 years, researchers working on marketing effectiveness have changed the standing and practice of marketing. Stung by criticism that marketing was more art than science, and where was the proof that marketing worked and how it worked, researchers set out to establish beyond doubt what works and what doesn’t. The result? Several important things are no longer matters of opinion or debate.
Two researchers in particular, Les Binet and Peter Field, have been conducting large scale, long running analyses on the database of many thousands of marketing case studies gathered over decades by the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising.
They’ve discovered a lot but, as we hover near recession, two things they’ve proved conclusively are timely.
The first is about marketing in recession. Is it smarter to cut or stop spending on marketing until the economy recovers? Or should you maintain or increase your spend? It turns out that companies that ‘go dark’ and cut spending, get a short term lift from the savings they make, but pay dearly for it later. They do much worse in the medium to long term. Few recover the loss of share and momentum.
Why? Firms that do less make it easier for others who do the same or more. Their ‘Share of Voice’ becomes greater, so they become top of mind, and being top of mind is a key driver in customer acquisition, off and online. Firms that stay in the game do better in recession and enter recovery with momentum and raised awareness. Firms who go dark lose momentum and awareness. Restarting takes time and reconnecting is hard. Cutting marketing therefore has profound consequences. Lost momentum is often lost for ever.
Second, how you market matters. Is it smarter to focus on short-term sales activation to generate leads and traffic, with offers to motivate people to buy now? Or better to focus on the long, building your brand and awareness? What’s the optimum balance between short and long?
The optimum varies by market and by B2C and B2B, but as a rule of thumb it pays to allocate around 60% of budget to brand building and awareness, and 40% to sales activation. But it turns out, long is better at both anyway: brand building builds brand and awareness and is more effective at sales activation.
Construction, building products and home improvement is a mass of individual markets, but it’s surprising how static brand line-ups are. There are new faces but, like trench warfare, in many markets 40 years can pass and the No 1, 2 and 3 brands are still the top three.
Yet markets change, sometimes radically as we’ve seen in the last three years. Yesterday’s facts and insights can date and quickly become obsolete.
If, consciously or unconsciously, you are employing the same assumptions and insights as everyone else, using the same playbook as your competitors, and playing the market leader’s game, how will your marketing be significantly different or more effective? And without stepping outside your own bubble to ask the right questions, of the right people, in the right way, how will that change?
Bubble? We can thank the debates about social media for revealing the insidious and largely invisible effect of social bubbles. Whether we’re fully aware of them or not, we tend to cluster in bubbles of like minded people who share and reinforce our beliefs and values, so it becomes hard to see things as they really are.
But that’s what sales teams are for? So, people say, why do we need market research to tell us what the sales team already knows? They talk to customers and the market day in day out. They know our products, markets, customers and competitors better than anyone. True, the very best probably do. But our research consistently shows the effects of ‘the bubble.’ Confident your management team can beat the bubble? Put it to the test!
Even the closest customers aren’t an open book, and your team see the world through a group lens. If they’re any good, they must do. The positive of that is the strength of the team, the negative, the blinker of groupthink. We see what we expect to see. Just as fish are unaware of the water they swim in, few people sense the bubbles they live and work in.
This could be your most valuable takeaway: Good research is the foundation of effective marketing. Research can provide fresh insights and facts, facts you know that your competitors don’t. Facts and insights to transform your marketing, competitive advantage and market share.
Are you doing enough research, of the right kind? Or just waiting for the tide to turn and carry you with it?
If you want help researching the insights and facts to build your brand and make your marketing more effective, talk to Yvette Kirk at yvette@mra-research.co.uk.
