Impress Media

What price marketing?

Nina — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:45:10 +0000

I went to my local car dealer the other day. “Make me the fastest chick in town!” I cried, pointing to the ridiculously shiny beast of a car, growling at me from the corner of the yard. “Certainly,” said the dealer, “that will be £25,000.”

“Well,” I said, “I have £10,000.” The dealer’s face began to darken. “No, wait!” I said cheerily, “you haven’t heard all of it yet! I want to add a few things. Now – let’s see. I want some nice new alloys on it. And a new paint job – metallic pink obviously. And a satnav system. Thing is I don’t want to pay any more for any of that, but I would like it all done this afternoon. Oh and I’m sure I’ll add a few more bits and pieces later on. I take it that’s all OK?”

I left the dealership rapidly and not by my own propulsion.

It’s a fanciful tale but a familiar one. Every day we cope with projects that grow and grow, budgets that stay rock tight, and timescales that are to say the least demanding. Every business wants to be the fastest chick in town, and some have the insight to see what exceptional marketing can do for them. But when it comes to the reckoning, do businesses really value marketing? Or, and it’s hard to believe we are still having this debate, is it still seen as an overhead, a place to cut costs, a place to scrimp rather than invest?

Perhaps we marketers ourselves are to blame. It’s a troubled profession, famed for its bullshit and rightly so in many cases. Marketing has been raised to a religion, the true path to bottom line bliss, and like many religions can be taken over by the wily, the loquacious and worst of all, the incompetent. With most companies having been the victim of some bad marketing at some time or other, it puts us in a difficult position. The real bottom line is, it’s difficult for a marketer to gain trust. Difficult to convince people that a decent, strategic marketing approach takes a bit of time – time you’d pay your mechanic for, time you’d pay your lawyer for, but time you’re somehow loathed to pay your marketing agency for.

And so – a constant need to justify ourselves. No harm in accountability mind. I’m a great fan of Peter Doyle and his value-based marketing philosophy. Marketers, he argues, are increasingly marginalised in business because of their abject failure to measure, or even produce, financial results. But inspired marketing really can bring results – just ask clients like Menu Shop, Audience Systems and 3Sphere.

Smaller companies are often scared of spending their marketing budgets. After all, the smaller the marketing budget, the more every penny spent has to count. But those pennies do have to be spent. A website for instance may look like a bunch of words and pictures on a page but leading up to that point are hours and days of planning, design, copywriting, image manipulation, coding, checking, changing, changing, and inevitably, changing again. And every change sparks off more planning, more redesign, a tweak to the copywriting, a change to the image, more coding and – well you see where I’m going.

With web projects in particular, there’s usually a point sometime in the development of a project when the client sees its true potential. Of course, they saw potential from the start, or they never would have commissioned it. But suddenly the imagination goes wild. “We could do this! And this! And maybe even…. could you….. is there any chance of…. [hushed tones] that?” This we blame ourselves for, and we’re proud to have ignited the spark that fired the imagination. But this takes an hour. And that – a day. And sometimes, just sometimes, we just can’t squeeze it all into your budget.

Look, I know we marketers are a strange species. We say “brand” a lot, we like lining things up and we get weird thrills from your web stats. But please just try to understand us. Just as you understood the car dealer who gave me the boot earlier in our tale. We can double the number of products on your website half way through its development. We can help you exploit a crazy new opportunity by totally rewording your brochure a day before it’s due to print. And we KNOW it will give you the results you crave (else we’d tell you not to do it). But please don’t make us apologise for billing you just a little bit more for it. After all there can only be one fastest chick on this block – and we love it to be you.

Smaller But Smarter

Nina — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:48:25 +0000

While Impress works with a huge variety of businesses, many of our clients represent the bread and butter of the economy – the noble small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The more aspirational owners and marketers within these businesses (and these are our favourite clients!) are often to be heard musing on how they can be the Mercedes, Apple or Prada of their industry – and quite rightly too. These businesses have built their brands to such an extent that their very names conjure up instant perceptions, respectively, of reliability, innovation and style.

But while there IS plenty to be learned from these big hitters, there is also a great deal that larger organisations could learn from some smaller businesses. I have worked with and for a real variety of businesses – from a five person start-up to a multi-billion dollar corporation, and the following points consistently hold true.

Firstly, when it comes to marketing, the smaller the budget, the more ingenuity is needed to make it work. A marketing budget should be anything between three and ten percent of a company’s turnover – but when that turnover is in five or six figures, there is little room for error in marketing. The best SMEs use their budgets only where they can see significant effects on the bottom line. They advertise to create footfall for specific sales, events and exhibitions. They use PR to deliver brand messages to a clearly defined audience. They put in place pay-per-click campaigns to drive closely targeted prospects to their websites. All this drives sales – and grows the business.

Secondly, with a limited budget, you need an agency or agencies who really deliver. SMEs do not want to pay hordes of agency personnel to sit around conceptualising, beard rubbing and, God forbid, blue sky thinking. They want an agency who instantly understand their business, and simply deliver great marketing. The question is, do bigger brands always make their agencies follow the same discipline?

Thirdly, for SMEs, knowledge of the business is not dispersed over departments, divisions and even continents – it is often held in the head of one individual. While large corporations struggle to implement effective Knowledge Management Systems to speed up labouring decision-making processes, smaller businesses can already have reacted to a change in the environment, effected a change, marketed it and be selling it to the corporation’s customers! And, while larger businesses sometimes need to pay consultants to answer the most fundamental of marketing questions: “who are my customers?”, smaller businesses know who their customers are – they have met them, they know what they want, and in Impress’ case, they are probably going for a drink with them later.

So finally to the most important aspect of a business – its people. While individual incompetence can be disguised in a poorly managed larger organisation, in SMEs there is nowhere to hide. While everyone has a crucial role to play in the success of the business, any individual failings can be disastrous for the business as a whole. Smaller companies can only succeed buy recruiting only the most excellent and driven people – and larger businesses should do the same – but this for any business is probably the biggest challenge of all.

Impress - Agency Update - November 2007

Andrew — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:25:31 +0000

Nina’s comments on the Home Page of the Impress site absolutely capture the essence of what the agency is all about and the breathtaking speed with which client expectation is pushing us into new marketing territory. The onslaught of the digital age is transforming the promotional activities of our clients and I sometimes actually lose track of the number of projects we have on the go at the same time.

Quite apart from the thrill of the creative process, the sheer joy of witnessing marketing strategies leading directly to commercial success is hitherto unparalleled in my professional career. Potentially lucrative enquiries stem from our clients’ websites on a daily basis and it is fantastic to see relatively small companies punching way above their weight due solely to their commitment to the web. The Internet has flattened the commercial playing field and even the tiniest organisations can appear ‘global’ online.

Google Adwords and emailers provide affordable advertising mechanisms that render size of company, turnover or status as completely irrelevant. In the words of Kevin Roberts, “companies no longer have to be irreplaceable, they have to be irresistible”. What a fantastic ethos this is. With competition never so ferocious, transparency never so essential and price never so inconsequential, companies now have to focus completely on service, customer care, brand values and delivery. A quick reference to some of our clients -Thermaglaze, Big Bang Events, Audience Systems, 3Sphere, Orchard Park and Fit2BSeen - who all personify the ‘Lovemarks’ philosophy so central to Impress.

So, as the year approaches its final curtain call, I reflect on the agency's achievements this year and they are many fold. Some fabulous brand work, new businesses successfully launched, lots of new clients, existing relationships cemented, profitability, some truly wonderfully talented new members of the team and the foundation for further expansion in 2008. There have been casualties too and we are far from perfect, but we have worked out what we are very good at and where we are going.

The journey is perhaps only just beginning for Impress. A new brand ID and website is almost complete and will be finally unveiled in January once we have all chilled out for Christmas. I have started writing a company magazine, but this might have to wait until a few massive projects are complete.

Before I sign off, lots of congratulations to various members of the agency family: Big Bang’s Cannon Bridge Roof Garden for winning the award for the Coolest Reception Venue by Prestige Events magazine, Chloe and Tommy for the birth of Beau, their second child, Martin (ever Martin) on his engagement to Laura and Nina for, well, just being Nina…..

Research – Empirical Evidence For Business Decisions

Mark — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:19:00 +0100

At Impress we advocate the use of research to give real customer feedback on what your customers think about your brand, ideas, performance and won and lost accounts.

The key to research is to make the customer feel that their opinion is valued, and it is, in this sense it is a brand exercise in its own right despite the results.

Another key part of research is that it is conducted from an independent credible source so that your customers are as open and honest as possible, that they don’t hold back but tell you the truth – good or bad.

Recently we have conducted research on behalf of Space Works, an office design, fit out and furniture supply specialists; Blue Marlin, a brand packaging design agency with offices around the world as well as Big Bang Events, a corporate events specialist and Busy Bodies, a local gym in Wiltshire and Audience Systems, a seating supplier for stadia all over Europe..

The results have been fascinating and as always contain real insight into the customer perception (perception is reality) and real nuggets of information that can be acted on immediately.

The perception of your brand comes through time and time again, and how individuals and team dynamics in your company can make a real difference to customer perception, do they live the brand ethos and demonstrate it when communicating with your customers?

The research has delivered perceptions of company names and possible name changes, the sales process – information flow, is it timely and accurate? How you have performed on a project, and how to improve your products and services.

An area that Impress is particularly zealous about is the Internet, how people are using it, what they want from your website and how they view your competitors? Openness and honesty are themes that constantly come up.

Not only has the research given evidence of areas of customer concern, but also how they like to be communicated with, whether they have future work on the horizon that you can pitch/tender for or even how they found out about you in the first place and how and why they selected you or not, as the case may be. The results of which can be acted on and a marketing strategy implemented for the future.

Research is essential on making key business decisions and all the research projects that we have conducted have led to our clients changing the way they do business. So for an insight into what your customers really think, contact Mark Cadbury or Andrew Pinnell.

Living The Dream

Andrew — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:02:42 +0100

In the true spirit of a blog, my entries will more often than not, be characterised by journalistic reflections inspired by my role as MD of a fledgling full service agency in West Wiltshire. Having been cossetted in the cotton wool of the corporate sector pre-Impress, nothing quite prepared me for the emotional roller-coaster of starting a new business.

We are almost two years in now and have a full-time complement of staff. We have over seventy clients who range from one-man band electricians to a truly dynamic packaging design agency with a portfolio of worldwide offices and blue chip clients. However, in the main, our clients fit snugly into the SME category so we tend to be dealing primarily with company owner and start-ups. Budgets are as tight as the proverbial duck and ROI (return-on-investment) is not so much a glibly used acronym but, moreover, an absolute necessity. If it doesn't work, why should I pay for it....la, la, la - the maxim of the wonderfully grounded British entrepreneur!

We genuinely do offer a full-service, as proudly proclaimed on this our new website(http://www.impress-media.co.uk). We do genuinely strive to deliver strategies, tactical tools and materials designed to boost the clients' bottom line. We absolutely have to. There is no hiding place in the mindset of the SME. Absolutely none. There is a culture of squeezing every drop of value from any marketing outlay. An understandable desire to maximise every penny spent. Failure to be accountable and transparent breeds cynicism, resentment and ultimately, a lost client.

So this is the landscape of Impress. No longer protected by a corporate culture whereby an under-achieving marketing campaign can be shrugged off behind a smoking mirror of raising awareness, Mark my co-director, staff and I offer high level marketing expertise to the most driven, passionate and demanding clientele imaginable. And do you know what? We absolutely love it. We revel in the aspirations and desire of all our clients. Sharing their frustrations and living their dreams. Striving to provide the apex of customer service, design excellence and strategic planning on a par with are more illustrious (and expensive) agency counterparts.

Let no-one think that Impress is anything other than a committed and client facing agency and that we only prosper when our work succeeds. Touch wood, this is just the beginning. Impress - quite simply - creating the difference.