How Can You Become a Smarter Marketer?

Where do we start? 

First by moving your strategy and spending decisions down the consumer purchase funnel – the one which starts with building awareness and ends with brand loyalty.  Stop being satisfied with building and reporting gains in awareness.  As Scott Bedbury said “Awareness is fools gold”.  Anyone can drive it, but does it really matter today?  Only as a precursor to how many consumers you’re driving into your purchase funnel.  It time to look for ways to connect with your customers in a way that helps to lock them into your brand.  This means finding new media formats that are a better mixture of promotion and advertising – online media is certainly a strong candidate here.  Find those mediums that can deliver an indication of customer reaction – “how may calls or online registrations did we generate” not what is the cost of a GRP.

Its time to start shifting dollars in a major way from TV to other mediums; it time to face the fact that we need to integrate brand building with product movement.  This will require changing the way we allocate our funds.  It will require that we innovate, think differently, think like our customers.

Starbucks and LL Bean used little advertising to build their businesses.  They instead used a lot of very smart marketing.  How can you become a smarter marketer?

Comments

[Bill Kelm - Brokerblogger]

I agree with "Its time to start shifting dollars in a major way from TV to other mediums; it time to face the fact that we need to integrate brand building with product movement."

I just got finished reading a thread on Threadwatch.org where this comment by someone who has done both Internet and traditional branding marketing. I found his comment to be wise:
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7024#comment-40956

Another's comment went like this: "Hey Ad-Agency, I Tivo & skip your commercials, don't read the newspaper, much less magazine ads, I throw away all snail-mail advertisements, filter email spam, listen to my Ipod (not the radio), ignore highway billboards, and havent touched the yellowpages in years. I am the next generation - where are you going to advertise to me?"

I think the entire post is well worth the read to see some of the current interaction between Search Marketers and a tradition ad agency person:
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7024