B2B Marketing
It’s been said that if consumer marketing is a game of draughts, then by comparison B2B marketing is 3D chess. That’s because B2B marketers have to overcome a myriad of complex challenges that consumer marketers rarely face: The decision-making process is infinitely more complex for a business compared to a consumer B2B marketers have a number …
Continue reading “B2B marketing is a fiendishly complex puzzle: here’s how to solve it”
Insurance is dull, no matter how marketers try to dress it up. Renewing your annual insurance policy is a grind akin to queuing at the bank, or filling the car up with fuel. The less time you spend doing it the better. Indeed any time you spend doing it is resented. Yet once a year we are …
Continue reading “How creating an emotional reason to purchase can trump a rational one”
Imagine a client that wants to launch a new product that helps cats sit on mats. The Marcomms Manager at the client briefs their agency. After two weeks of locking themselves away, the agency turns up at the Marcomms Manager’s doorstep and unveil their meisterwork concept. Visual: Cat sat on client’s mat. Headline: “The Cat Sat …
Continue reading “How to get better, faster, cheaper work from your creative agency”
Many years ago I used to run graduate recruitment for an ad agency. As a warm up exercise on recruitment day, I asked each of the participants to write on the flipchart the name of the last newspaper or magazine they bought, and why they bought it. One by one, up they got. “Cosmo – …
Continue reading “Why you should always make the logo smaller”
Your proposition is the single-sentence answer to the question: “Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”. Remember, you’re only allowed ONE reason. It’s the elevator speech for someone only going up one floor. That single sentence ideally should have only ONE verb and ONE adjective. Finding that one good reason is deceptively difficult. …
It’s over 21 years since the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers published a report that claimed that “Payment By Results will form 75 per cent of advertising agency contracts within five years”. https://www.marketingweek.com/payment-by-results-is-on-the-way-says-isba/ Two decades later, and the forecast rush to payment-by-results doesn’t seem to have materialised. Having worked on both client and agency sides, the …
Continue reading “Pay your creative agency by results? Be careful what you wish for…”
In Professor Byron sharp’s recent piece in Campaign (“Why the best response to Covid-19 was to stop advertising”) the Prof rails against the endless hand-wringingly earnest advertising many big brands put out in the wake of Covid. In the article he is quoted as saying that it is “embarrassing arrogance” that marketers would think people were …
Continue reading ““You say it best when you say nothing at all?””
At one point in his life, Sam Walton – the founder of Walmart – was the richest man in America. Once a week, every single week, even at the height of his wealth, Sam would travel to a random store in the chain, and spend the morning working on the tills. This wasn’t so he …
