Traveling at a 110 km per hour can be good for your brain or bad – you be the judge of that. I’m on my way home from Sälen and since I’m not behind the wheel I had some time over to get one of my thoughts out of my head. Thank god for 3G.
The other day as I was reading the morning paper it made me sad to see how many brands had gone from brand communication to price communication. The entire paper was filled with SALE, LOW PRICE, OFFER etc. Of course it is the global recession luring desperate brand owners away from making people love their brands and instead trying to buy customers. A strategy that is quite stupid and short term, especially in paid media channels like print.
As I continued reading the paper I came to think about Nigel – Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst with Millward Brown writes one of the better strategy blogs online. In one of his latest posts ‘Less is not more’ he guided me to a report he wrote already last year about ‘Marketing During Recession’. In that reports he talks about hands-on survival tactics on how keep your brand alive during the recession. He writes about the established relationship between share of voice (SOV) and share of market (SOM).
“When a brand’s share of voice is greater than its share of market, it is likely to grow its market share in the coming year. (if you hadn’t heard about this it’s time you did). Therefore, companies that increase their marketing investment when others are cutting back have an opportunity to substantially improve the standing of their backs.”
Makes sense doesn’t it?
Still the most common reaction in a recession is that brands will cut down on their marketing activities and especially move from brand communication to price communication when in fact the opportunity to strengthen your brand and it’s share of voice is obviously the most effective as most other brands within your branch will probably do the opposite.
Nigel also writes:
“In any communication channel, the best way to leverage your spend is to put it behind high-quality creative. A meta-analysis of econometric sales modeling published in Admap (February 2006) found creative to be the biggest potential multiplier of profit (other than market size). Across a wide variety of categories, brands, and channels, Paul Dyson and Karl Weaver found that creative had five times as much impact on profit as did budget allocation.”
Yihaaa!
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