Market Planning
Have you ever found yourself in a store, at a till, swiping your card and walked away from any sum of your own money without knowing what you were buying? Not likely. This kind of thing happens every day in consulting houses and agencies all over the world. This is how I compare the idea of developing advertising campaigns without a solid link to your business objectives or concrete way of measuring the impact afterwards. I’m not going to sit here and beat up ad agencies, because the larger issue is that companies don’t give most agencies anything to work with.
Advertising without a plan
You need to ask yourself… Why am I communicating with the public? What is the call to action I’m trying to create? Is the value of that call to action worth more than I’m spending? What perceptions that are blocking further market progression am I trying to move?
Advertising without measurement
Here’s a couple more things you need to ask yourself… What are the most core aspects of our business model that cause people to want to do business with us? How are we doing in each of those areas? Where are the greatest gaps? How successful was our last advertising campaign in moving those core brand attributes forward?
Here are a few things to think about:
You need to establish a clear path for your advertising BEFORE you release the advertising hounds. You won’t know what this path is before you conduct enough of a study of your business environment to know how your brand performs in it’s natural habitat… the open market. Once you have implemented your campaign, you won’t really know how successful it was until you have compared the desired shifts in brand attribute perceptions against an updated measurement sample.
This is a simple sort of framework, but if you’re lacking any of these components… stop swiping your card until you have all your ducks in line.