For the past ten years working in digital marketing, the world has been divided into Branding and Performance Marketing. Branding is full of large budgets and not much accountability for their results. Performance Marketing (or Direct Response) has ugly creatives but gets beautiful, carefully documented returns.
Advertising has not always been lik…
Category: Recent Posts
Delivering Better Brand Experiences: Why It’s So Hard and What to Do About It
Great marketing is about making consumers enjoy the experience they have with your brand. Every consumer touchpoint should be a delightful brand experience, even when carrying a commercial message. This is how you positively impact everyday customer behavior and purchasing decisions. If we want people to change how they behave, we have to change their experiences. In spite of this knowledge, brand marketing is often tied to vanity metrics that don’t drive any real behavior change, and performance marketing is not much better than the cheesy infomercial you see on late-night TV.
But marketers want to do better: no one sets out to do a mediocre job. The industry is continuously innovating to deliver better brand experiences and drive impact, but the results are often inconsistent, making it difficult to know what new practices to adopt.
This post explores some of the current efforts made to provide a better brand experience. Through this careful exploration, we’ll discuss why it’s so hard to raise the bar and look to the future to see how to break out of stale marketing cycles.
The Hidden Threat for CPG Companies
Last week I was invited to a roundtable with other CPG industry experts, and we were asked if we thought the competition for CPG companies was going to intensify or decrease over the next 12 to 24 months. My answer was similar to the other experts’, but I gave different reasons than many of them. After a few days pondering about the answer I gave, I realized that I was way off base. While other experts reasonably argued that competition would increase due to the pressure retailers create by promoting private label brands, I justified my answer saying that the raise of eCommerce would force CPG companies to develop skills and knowledge not currently in their repertoire, forcing them to compete in a field mostly foreign to them. Now I realize I was completely off. Let me explain why.
Why you shouldn’t use CLTV/CAC
Long-Term Business Sustainability Depends on the Right Measures
A metric commonly used to measure the performance of high-growth businesses is Customer Lifetime Value over Customer Acquisition Cost, or more simply CLTV/CAC. It is a much better metric to provide an objective to marketing teams than many others we have seen in the past, but it has also some tremendous flaws associated with it, and if not used correctly and in the right context, it can jeopardize the business using it.
How to Plan a Marketing Campaign: from Strategy to Tactics – Part 2
Once you have a clear sense of your business objective and your target audience (topics we discussed in Part 1 of this series), it’s time to take those actionable steps you identified and put them to work for ongoing results. Making a strong plan for your marketing strategy allows you to build on your knowledge, providing ongoing results with sma…