Marketing Tactegy

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.