Wimbledon’s on and it still hasn’t rained? What the heck is going on?
The one defining feature of the British weather – a total lack of consistency.
When it comes to marketing, you don’t want to be Britain. You want to be Santa Barbara. Because, in marketing, consistency is what delivers a result.
It’s Christmas!!
The hottest week of the year and here I am writing about Christmas. It’s ridiculous.
In truth, it’s not just me struggling to stitch together festive metaphors while the sun is cracking the flags; there will be features writers all over the country gearing up for Christmas, right here, right now.
When you work in marketing that whole money thing is often the elephant in the room.
Before we had online marketing and analytics tools, it was difficult to accurately measure the return on investment (ROI) gained from spending money on a marketing activity.
Even now, marketeers often don’t have the time (or the wherewithal) to gather the measurements needed to justify costs. And, without a measurable ROI, marketing is seen as an expensive drain on resources. A marketing team or budget are often the first to be hacked away in tough times.
To me, culling projects in an attempt to reduce the cost of marketing seems like a bum move.
Ask any marketeer what their marketing plan process is, and you’ll get wildly different answers.
The truth is that, while there are industry-wide, well-recognised techniques for creating a plan, we all develop our preferred way of doing it.
I have honed and refined my process over the years. It now has as its backbone the teaching I received of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) framework, layered with hands-on experience of creating plans as in-house marketing manager, modified to reflect the challenges that I see business owners facing every day.
Ever been to the supermarket last thing on a Sunday, just before they close at 4pm, only to make your way home and then realise, too late, that you forgot one of the main items on your shopping list? Your best hope for recreating Nigella’s latest offering is that your local corner shop is stocking kaffir lime leaves or harissa paste amongst its ancient tins of Vaseline and Fray Bentos pies.
This can happen in the world of business brand design too.
All businesses make mistakes. We can’t be perfect. We can’t always mind read exactly what our customers are expecting us to deliver, and that expectation gap sometimes proves problematic. The occasional apology for messing up or failing to deliver what was expected, is a necessary business evil. Just like the dreaded tax return.
There’s another reason why you should always apologise when you’ve made a mistake. Because it’s the right thing to do. There is nothing worse than silence from a business that you KNOW has wronged you.