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Is 100% Of Your Advertising Budget Wasted?
Marketing |
John Wanamaker, the famous department store baron of the
1900s, believed that half the money he spent on
advertising was wasted, the trouble was he didn’t know
which half. I wonder what he’d say about today’s media
landscape where the options are endless. Where does an
advertiser turn to find the best return on investment
for advertising dollars? TV? Radio? Newspapers?
Magazines? The Internet? Direct Mail? E-mail?
One thing old Wanamaker had going for him was an ability
to build a strong corporate brand for his department
store and to make sure that brand was understood and
interpreted internally and externally. If he hadn’t done
so, then none of his advertising would have made a lick
of difference.
Many corporations today spend incredible amounts of
money on advertising to convey to the world the essence
of their corporate brand, its promise, and what
customers can expect from it. Yet sadly, little time and
money are spent internally to help employees better
understand, embrace and “speak” the brand.
Recent Doremus research with worldwide C-Level
executives in the service sectors revealed widespread
gaps between a company’s brand promise and what the
customer actually gets. These “disconnects” are the
result of a cultural misalignment, found widely in many
service companies, where the internal understanding of
the brand doesn’t match with its external
communications. When this occurs, even traditional
measures of advertising such as awareness, recall,
engagement and market share don’t mean anything …
because they don’t reflect the reality of the brand
experience.
Companies, particularly those in the service sectors
like tech firms, banks or telecommunications companies,
operate structurally as “silos,” separate entities
working under the same banner but not as a team. This
makes cultural alignment practically impossible and the
brand suffers.
When a brand is not nurtured within all departments on
the inside, it leeches brand value on the outside.
Internal branding begins with a corporate culture that
is clearly defined and understood by all levels within
the organization.
One way to measure whether a brand is being fully
expressed at the company’s base level, among its sales
staff and front office employees, is to look carefully
at its language. Words must mean the same thing to
everyone. Because when language is misunderstood, it
leads to frustration, creates mistrust and that can
irreparably damage the brand.
Ironically, the word most often misunderstood in service
businesses is the word “service” itself. This was
revealed in Doremus research where Chief Information
Officers, charged with purchasing technology for their
companies, admitted to us that they were distrustful of
the offerings from technology “vendor” firms.
To the CIOs the word “service” was defined as the act of
purchasing and upgrading the company’s IT system. To put
it bluntly, service meant delivering on the promise that
it will work and that you’ll fix it when it’s broke.
But to the Chief Marketing Officers at the tech
companies, service had an entirely different meaning.
Service meant the relationship between themselves and
their customers. It meant the promise housed in the
service agreement. It meant an ongoing dialog to ensure
brand reliability.
Banks are another example of service companies that
suffer from misalignment between the internal and
external “experiencers” of their brands. What’s
promised, through the advertising and promotional
materials to customers and potential customers, must be
in sync with the bank’s corporate culture and that must
be communicated through the bank’s brand ambassadors …
its employees.
When the culture is clearly defined, it permeates
everything: From the receptionists’ style, to the
company dress code, to the office décor, to the training
programs, to the advertising, to the style of internal
memos, to what the CEO conveys in speeches and
interviews on TV, to the tone of the annual report, to
promises made by the sales staff to customers and
whether those promises are promptly and effectively
fulfilled.
Without brand alignment inside and out, no part of the
advertising budget is effective … not even John
Wanamaker’s fifty percent.
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