Marketing Week

It’s probably too early to tell which way the pendulum will swing in the long term, but the indications so far incline more towards thrift than extravagance.

Sales of Innocent smoothies and Starbucks coffees have fallen and Nestlé has pull the plug on its premium Heaven chocolate brand in supermarkets.

Consumers, it seems, are taking a leaf out of the banks’ books and hanging onto their cash for fear of future economic setbacks, which of course only increases the likelihood of a recession. In such a difficult climate, it’s the marketer’s job to persuade consumers to dip into their hard-earned savings.

“If you don’t do any marketing,” says Tony Spong of agency selection company AAR, “you’re dead.”

Tony says brands should continue with the marketing programme in a downturn, otherwise they might not survive the recession.

His predicts a pause in marketing expenditure while marketers reassess their budgets and channels. After that, he sees the strong re-emergence of both data and digital direct marketing.

First you need to identify your operational needs, addressing the specific areas that are giving you difficulties. Typically there will be a few issues that vary from customer to customer, and these are often the most important to deal with after that.

As in so many areas of marketing, the name of the game is: understand what you want to achieve. Then you stand more chance of achieving it.

‘Neuro marketing’ is described as an ‘innovative approach to marketing research’ in The Telegraph. The repeat exposure to the same advert or product, it is claimed, can enable scientists to uncover subconscious responses.

Sounds all every hi-tech - until you get to the part that describes how volunteer consumers have to wear a specially-designed baseball cap to measure their brainwaves.

As many people have noted, Barack Obama ran a well-organised presidential campaign, leaning heavily on modern marketing techniques.

Scott-blogger goes as far as to say Obama’s electoral victory was thanks more to a brilliant marketing strategy than better political ideas. While it’s beyond our remit to comment on that here, we agree with him that Obama’s campaign demonstrated a lot of clever marketing thinking.

Marketers can learn a lot of useful lessons here.

Selling a product or service to a customer isn’t quite the same as selling a new president to the voting public, but the cross-over is striking. Concepts like ‘present a new image’ and ‘position yourself clearly’ are as true in the commercial world as in the political one.

Incidentally, GOP, for non-US readers, stands for Grand Old Party, or the Republicans.

With just a few hours to go before the end of the American presidential campaign, it’s instructive to reflect on the part that digital marketing techniques have played.

Will UK politicians apply the lessons of the US election in their home grown campaigns, asks Noelle MacElhatton at Brand Republic? Hell, yes, comes the reply!

As Paul Glazowski says on Mashable, this truly has been the YouTube election. He comments: “Plenty of us can delight in the fact that the people have influenced things more than they ever have before.”

It’s a thought echoed on Geeky Corner, where you’ll find a list of the many sites and services that made this “the most socially involved election in modern history.” One of the highlights selected is YouTube’s Video Your Vote, where people are encouraged to “video their voting experience.”

Only in America, you might say – at least for now.

Russell Brand isn’t the only brand being talked about here. There is undoubtedly a lesson to be learnt from what is happening to Brand BBC. For a start, all good marketers know that when a crisis hits, you should deal with it quickly and efficiently for maximum damage limitation. So that was a big mistake on the part of the Beeb. A swift response could well have prevented BBC Radio 2’s chief Lesley Douglas resigning.

But there’s quite a list of those profiting from the whole fiasco - newspapers, magazines, TV and radio programmes - who’ve had nearly a week’s worth of headlines to drawn in more listeners/viewers and sell more copies.

Also profiting, more specifically is, reportedly, Channel 4 which is seeing show ratings up for Russell Brand’s show Ponderland, and sales of Fawlty Towers DVDs have also increased. And Brand himself seems to be coming out of the whole thing very much intact as sales of any DVDs he stars in are also on the rise, implying that ‘no publicity is bad publicity’.

It remains to be seen whether the other protagonist in the affair, Jonathan Ross, will suffer brand damage. No doubt he will be back on his TV and radio slots in three months time pretty much unscathed, although he has stepped down from presenting the British Comedy Awards. Of course, ITV will also profit from the publicity in announcing a new presenter for the show.

Apart from Andrew Sachs, it seems that only the BBC is likely to feel any knock-on effect from the incident, although it’s difficult to know how this may manifest itself. So, there are a couple of points here. In a crisis, don’t procrastinate, admit you are wrong (if you are) and quickly and publicly show how you are putting things right and your brand is more likely to weather the storm.

On the other hand - it seems far more are benefiting than losing out of this particular crisis and what we are asking is - is it profiteering when one man’s downfall is another man’s gain?

Overflowing American mailboxes can testify that, among the razzmatazz of crowd-pleasing rallies and opponent-knocking TV ads, they are turning to more traditional means of engaging with the voters – direct mail.

As US journalist Jim Kuhnhenn notes, direct mail is part of the US political message playbook.

Does direct mail have a role in these TV-obsessed days when a fetching pair of specs or a Hollywood endorsement gets you as much attention as a speech on the global financial squeeze? Barack Obama and John McCain, not to mention their running mates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, evidently think so.

That’s not to say their mailed messages are any more polite than those on TV.

A review, quoted by Eli Saslow in The Washington Post, of direct mail advertisements found they had become ‘more spiteful, more exaggerated and often more ominous.’ Candidates find it less damaging to their image, apparently, to make attacks through the mail than on TV.

Direct mail, says Saskow, has influenced US political campaigns since the late 1960s and its influence is growing.

Why? Because it works; direct mail has a history of swaying voters late in elections. Because it’s specific; direct mail can be targeted to voters in particular neighbourhoods. Because it’s good value; direct marketing campaigns are cheaper than mass market television ads.

And, finally and less admirably, because – in the US at least – campaigners feel in print they can be more negative.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to advertisers in today’s digital age. In fact, anyone not using a web address on every piece of company or brand literature shouldn’t be in the marketing business at all!

But the study does highlight the importance of using traditional direct mail in tandem with online information in order to maximize brand awareness.