Marketing Tactegy

Surround-Sound Marketing

Surround-sound, or 360 degree or integrated marketing campaigns have become hot topics in the last few years and have enabled marketers to design and deliver very effective marketing campaigns.

Surround-sound marketing and psychologics

Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart describe the process in detail in their book ‘What Sticks,’ but let me give a brief overview here.  At a high level the interaction between media is more than just providing multiple touches about a specific message.  The idea is that the messages are reinforced between each other.  In particular, the concept of ‘psychologics’ means that, for example, a print ad actually helps the mind conjure up the imagery of a corresponding, previously viewed TV ad.  Because of this the value of the print ad is actually higher than the value of a print ad where there was no corresponding TV imagery.  This is probably the reason why many non-TV ads are improperly attributed to TV because they trigger the mind to conjure up the images from the TV commercial.

If, for the moment, we leave aside the active or passive exposure to a media type and if we assume that the viewing of a commercial on television delivers the most imagery, because it has both video and audio components, then it should be that a single viewing has the largest influence.  Radio has only an audio component.  Print has a visual and written component (and sometimes odor), but does require more active participation to read and absorb the message in the ad.  In this case in order to get the biggest bang for the buck out of a surround sound marketing campaign, then the most imagery oriented ad should be run first followed by the other media.

Traditional media analytics may be wrong

This has a lot of implications to help marketers improve media buying and flighting.  It also has implications of how marketers measure the results of their surround-sound marketing campaigns.  Simply correlating impressions of the various media elements to bumps and wiggles in the outputs may provide incorrect conclusions as to what is working and what isn’t.

We now need to know which consumers actually saw one ad only, two ads from different media and so on.  Only with this detailed viewership model can we truly see how effective one media channel is versus another.

If you have any comments on this I would love to hear them.  Please let me know.

Catalytic Marketing and Marketing ROI

There hasn’t been much discussion concerning catalytic marketing and marketing ROI, but there are clearly some issues that need to be dealt with.  Business to business marketers have been dealing with this for years, but it is now becoming more prevalent in the consumer space. 

If marketing delivers leads to a sales force through a trade show, shouldn’t the trade show marketing get the attribution for any deals that come out of it?  This is a typical situation in a business to business environment where marketing generates leads and sales works to convert them.

Using traditional media to drive non-traditional

In the consumer space a similar pattern is coming about where traditional media drives traffic to the web and that traffic is then marketed to in some fashion.  This might be with follow-on email campaigns, direct mail or even telemarketing.  A good example would be the recent Dove Cream Oil Body Wash, where traditional advertising was used to invite consumers to develop their own consumer generated advertising spots, where the chosen winning commercial would be played at the 2007 Oscars during a commercial break.  This initial traditional advertising delivered over one billion (and still counting) downloads on uncutvideo.aol.com.  Not only did the catalytic advertising deliver brand impressions, but the billion downloads did as well. 

In the Dove example in order to determine the total impact of the traditional advertising, the impact of the billion downloads would also have to be counted.

Catalytic marketing requires adjustment to our marketing analytics

There are a number of conclusions that we can draw from this discussion:

• Proper attribution requires that all follow-on results be correctly attributed
• Traditional advertising isn’t as dead as some would have us to believe
• Current analytic techniques must be adjusted in order to take this into account

If you have any comments on this I would love to hear them.  Please let me know.

Marketing Strategy and Tactics

What’s strategic?  What’s tactical?

I was with a great media buying agency in an all-day workshop and we were discussing the determination of strategic marketing actions and tactical marketing actions.

Is the launching of a product strategic or tactical?  If it is a new product for a technology startup, then I think we would all say that the launch is strategic.  But what if it is the launch of a new flavor of ice cream? Is that strategic or tactical?  I think you would agree that in this case the launch is significantly more tactical.  So the answer as to whether a particular marketing activity is strategic or tactical depends.

What lies in the middle of these two extremes then is stratactical.  Or maybe it’s tactegic.

Can you think of other instances where this is the case?  I certainly can.  You can look at each of the 4-Ps (Kotler’s Product, Price, Place and Promotion.  See Kotler’s Marketing Management (12th Edition).  I look forward to sharing more examples of tactegy and stratactics with you.

Let me know your comments.