This month we’re doing a series on Differentiation through the Marketing Mix. Mix 4 – How can you truly differentiate your organisation through Promotion?
What is the marketing mix?
Before that, a recap: The Marketing Mix consists of 7 elements Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Physical Evidence, Process, People. All these elements provide customer touch points that deliver a customer experience. They are all powerful ways to differentiate and position your organisation from the competition. Whichever way you decide to differentiate, it is critical that all the other marketing mix elements exude the same customer experience (CX)/positioning.
Promotion forms all aspect of marketing and sales activity. It reaches customers through a combination of media platforms and influence their perception of the brand or entices purchase.
A campaign must, however, have clear objectives, be targeted at the right audience on the right channels with an appropriate budget in respect to your category and company size. The devil is in the detail to clarify this BEFORE you start promoting and then closing monitoring performance using metrics that are relevant to your market and organisation.
Example of an effective promotional campaign
In 1988, Nike sales were $800 million. They introduced their iconic “Just Do It” campaign. Within a decade, sales topped $2 billion. “Just Do It” became a core message that still works 33 years later.
Today Nike is the number 1 global sports apparel company and here’s where the numbers get interesting – The top 2 companies apply similar global ad spend – Nike spends $3.11billion vs Adidas $3.04 billion, but the ROI demonstrates promotional effectiveness with Nike’s Brand value sitting at $34.8b versus Adidas worth half that amount at £16.5b. Additionally, Nike’s profit reaches $19.9 billion vs Adidas at $11,5 billion[lc1] .
The Nike marketing team remain firmly on consumer’s radars through their promotional spend and a consistent message. It would be rare for someone to not know that the swoosh belongs to Nike along with its famous campaign line ‘Just do it’.
The lesson here is that many marketers get bored of their own campaigns before their consumers have had chance to become familiar with it. Marketers start to create new campaigns when the reality is that they should consider the optimum allocations of media versus production spend in their entire budget pot. Campaign magazine stated the magic production number is 12.5% of your budget and the rest on media. The jury is out on that number which will, no doubt, be category specific.
Each part of your marketing mix tells a story, and you need to ensure that story is consistent in every part of the mix.
Let’s chat
Your organisation could be sitting on untapped value to increase that customer experience in other parts of your channels which could be identified in a CX review. If you’d like to discuss how a CX review works, drop me a message or book a complimentary no-obligation meeting and find out how I can help your business.
