The visceral thrill of the blue light going off at K-Mart illuminating the store with the message “hot deal here” was one of my first lessons learned in marketing. The second was a bit less intentional. While walking through a Piggly Wiggly with my mom, I mistakenly knocked a jar down from a shelf, which prompted the following message from the store manager: “Cleanup on Aisle 7.”
The silver lining on the previous two year’s sales recession has simply been that they have allowed for a “cleanup” on the marketing aisle. Each budget cut eliminated one more “legacy” program from the marketing plan. Fundamentally, many brands are now spending only on items that have proven to be essential to corporate success. With the recession seemingly receding, the question on the table is “where next?” The answer shouldn’t automatically be restoration of all the old programs to their prior spending levels. Let’s be honest, not every program that we deemed essential proved to be that. In fact, if your market share went up while your spending went down, there is some logic that says less is now officially more.
Here’s the reality. None of us know precisely which part of our marketing budget is producing with greatest impact. Much like with a great meal, it’s a combination of the individual elements that lift our brands. Some of those elements are directed at customer acquisition. Some at customer retention. Some at purchase activation. And others at community building. When we stir the marketing pot, we know we need the alchemy to blend seamlessly together to make the brand message relevant, involving and ultimately persuasive.
Here’s a thought for how to rebuild the marketing program now that budgets are once again flowing more freely (or when the budgets flow more freely).
First, align your thinking along the four core points of contact: point of discovery, point of sale, point of use and point of discussion. Develop strategies and tactics to make your brand most visible at each of these discussion points. Challenge yourself (or your team, or your agency) to develop programs that deliver the brand message effectively at each point. Develop more ideas than you can possibly execute. Forget the budget at this point, just find big honking ideas that make your mouth water with anticipation for sharing them with customers/consumers. Once you have completed reviewing all your “what if’s,” put an approximate cost next to each line idea (line item for those of you who don’t follow my clever renaming ploys). Gather your team and, as best as possible, assign a priority to each line item. Then rank the projects in order of the total points that each idea generated from the response of the team.
Now put the budget next to the line items. Reshuffle the deck to make certain that you have each of the four points of contact covered. If you had a hole, or just didn’t think the ideas generated against one of the four discovery points were strong enough, send the team back to solve that problem.
Then stack the selected projects/programs together for the basis for your marketing budget for the upcoming year. If management asks for reductions, your prioritization of projects should allow for a quick and direct response. If management loves the work and expands the budget to allow for additional ideas, the projects that you left behind from the top of your “ranking structure” can be brought forward with relative ease.
I’ve taken to looking at budget cuts as breath mints. They allow us to get rid of the excess that we allow to build up in the traditional expansion modes. (Do everything we did last year, and then add one new initiative to the plan.) How we rebound from the marketing recession in 2009 is going to tell us how well we do in the expansion of 2010.
Go ahead. Complete that cleanup on the marketing aisle. Instead of restoring legacy programs, reapportion the entire marketing plan based on your best prioritization of new tactics. That way, when the manager comes to review the progress of the cleanup, she’ll find a fresh new merchandising approach that elevates the aisle to a higher level instead of the previous mess.


