Things are starting to get back to normal around here, so I can finally begin to process my notes from the Global Marketing Summit I attended at the end of February. Due to a crisis back on campus, I only got to attend the first full day of the summit, but the sessions I attended offered a wealth of information about marketing.
First up was Greg Stuart, the co-author of What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds. (We got a free copy of the book during the conference, courtesy of LSF Interactive. I’ve read the first few chapters, and plan to post a review here once I finish the book. Stuart discussed the research behind What Sticks — an “experimental design” approach to testing marketing, similar to what drug companies do. Through their research in cooperation with 30 major companies, Stuart and co-author Rex Briggs extrapolate that about 38 percent of all U.S. advertising — or $112 billion of the $295 billion in ad spending — is wasted.
That finding led Stuart to pose the obvious question: “What if we were wrong?” Wrong about our assumptions that we know what works with marketing, that is. And if his research is on the mark, we’ve been wrong for quite some time now.
So, how did this happen? Why is so much money wasted on advertising? According to Stuart, it has to do with missing the mark on the three “Ms” of motivations (why customers buy a particular brand), messaging and media.
- 36 percent of advertisers missed the target on their customers’ motivations.
- Another 31 percent of advertisers got the message wrong. (47 percent missed one or both of the motivations and/or message.)
- A whopping 83 percent of the media mix somehow missed the mark. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it was sub-optimal.
To turn things around, Stuart suggests that organizations:
- First, get universal agreement to goals. What are the outcomes? What does the organization hope to accomplish, and what will success look like? Stuart and Briggs found that only one of the 30 companies they studied had universal agreement in place before embarking on an ad campaign.
- Have a backup plan — a Plan B. Tied to that, have a way of knowing when Plan A isn’t working so you can quickly switch to Plan B.
- Know the value of each and every dollar.
The amount of money higher ed spends on advertising is a mere pittance when compared to the corporate world. Still, we could benefit from this insight.
Andy writes! 