blog: customer investment

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5 reasons why your marketing might cost more than you think

Regardless of staying inside creative, media, production, programming, and fulfilment budgets

In this article we will try to look under the hood to reveal some hidden costs and reasons why marketing projects can fail to achieve the maxim of “Quality, delivered on time and to budget”.

1. Unclear expectations

Different expectations that were not properly communicated early in the process can derail a project until everyone’s expectations are met. These delays have a significant impact on ‘time to market’.

Remedy: It is essential that all the stakeholder expectations are documented, that they are agreed upon upfront, they are reasonable and that they form the blueprint for the delivery.

2. Too much rush

Rush has become the norm. Rushing increases the risk that important details will be missed and that quality will suffer. Less time does not mean less cost. When you pay more to get less you depreciate your marketing investment.

Remedy: Rush may be unavoidable. But the stakeholders need to be flexible, to either spread or focus resources within the timeline. Workload that can be shared should be spread across the group. Specialized tasks should be handed to those with that capability. Be sure to relieve them of distractions so that they can focus on those critical tasks. It takes a collective responsibility to make sure that rush projects receive the care and attention they need to succeed.

3. Process-driven to distraction

Too much process can also drive up cost and reduce efficiency. Rush projects should not be decapitated by too much bureaucracy. Larger projects that involve more stakeholders need more process, checks and balances, but the stakeholders are not always familiar with the rules.

Remedy: Don’t apply one process map to all projects. Prepare a fast-track and an optimal process for project management, to engage each situation efficiently. Make sure that the stakeholders understand the scope and nature of the project they are undertaking and how it affects the organization so they can learn and benefit from the process instead of being bogged down by it.

4. No thought to the financial cost of delay

Most organizations equate the ‘cost of delay’ with ‘loss of potential revenue’. In fact it goes much deeper.

Use a simple equation: Divide your labour cost for each project by its timeline to calculate your cost per day of delay. Then add it to your budget for the project after final delivery to see the true cost. For example, $100,000 over 10 months, if the work continues to the 11th month you have just invested an additional $10,000 to that project and lost 1 month of potential revenue.

Your agency is also affected when paid per-project. Your agency anticipates its revenue according to the project period. Delays will affect its cash-flow even if no additional work is done. If your agency is on a retainer you could actually be paying them a bonus for your delay. These are also hidden costs to add to the equation.

When you can’t achieve your objectives within the time and resources allocated, other projects in the pipeline get deferred, stacked, or are given less attention than they need. Agencies and clients feel these effects, but they don’t usually monetize the impact on their bottom line.

Remedy: The solution is to track this and then review at appropriate intervals. When you start to measure the cost of delay and discuss their implications it brings your team closer to understand how to maximize efficiency in the future to become more productive with less effort. When you have a good audit trail to measure you might consider using bonuses as an incentive for meeting performance expectations.

5. Getting it right; but not first time

How much effort does it take to get creative that is on-strategy, and then push it to final approval? If the creative and content is not in alignment, progress can be painfully slow and require multiple revisions to get what you need. If your agency demands too much of your time to get final approval, add this to the cost of your marketing investment.

Remedy: The greatest efficiency is where all agencies are in tune with the needs of the business, with only fine-tuning required at each stage of review. If you are not achieving this then it is time to either review your team or review your agency.

Conclusion

It may require some time and some careful crafting to build a marketing engine that flows smoothly through your department and your external agencies, but the productivity rewards makes it worthwhile to build. If you are not tracking these intangible costs you won’t know which changes could reduce your overall cost of marketing.

Hydrogen Creative believes in producing the right creative, first time. We engage fluid processes to enable more success at less cost. Engage us to experience the difference and see how well we stand by these beliefs.

Written By |Advertising Truths, B2B, B2C, Marketing Strategy, Uncategorized|Comments Off on 5 reasons why your marketing might cost more than you think
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The Vicious Circle of the Marketing Cycle

I have spoken throughout this blog about the problems of the goals-driven enterprise, as opposed to the customer-driven enterprise. The goals-driven enterprise has one mandate: to leverage its assets to achieve maximum wealth. The fastest way to do this is to tender shares publicly. This is how the shareholder becomes more important to the enterprise than the customer.

In an economic downturn, in order to maximize shareholder value the enterprise cuts prices to stimulate demand and cuts costs to maintain a margin. Marketing investment becomes highly expendable. What the enterprise is effectively saying is, “My products and my customers are now worth less to me so I am going to invest less in them so that my shareholders don’t complain about achieving a lower rate of return on my customer investment.”

This is perfectly reasonable accounting view of the marketing cycle. The Corporate Treasury says “When I am profitable I don’t mind risking some of that money in marketing as as long as I can see growth. When there is no growth then marketing is futile and it will be erased from the bottom line as long as I can prove in the books of accounts that it does not fuel growth.”

Let’s look at the possible consequences of this strategy:

– When you stop communicating with your customer and lower the price of your product, what does that do to the perceived value of the product, service or business? It creates a ‘new normal’. The value of the relationship with the customer flies out of the window and the product becomes a commodity item, indistinguishable from other low-cost solutions available.

– What happens when the economy comes back? The compelling reason customers bought your product/service in the past has been lost as the relationship linked through COMMUNICATION was severed by the Treasury. You find that your competitors have caught you up, or overtaken, and you realize that your name no longer carries weight. So what do you do? You hire an expensive branding or rebranding consultant and revamp all of your marketing literature and advertising to overcome the inertia caused by the vacuum that you created.

This gamble might pay off. But if it doesn’t the shareholders will excoriate you for failure and try to eject the Board. Or another competitor that did not cut of communication with its customers steamroller you into being bought. If you don’t believe this happens then you aren’t looking.

So how to get out of the vicious cycle? Be a customer-centric enterprise. When there is an economic downturn adapt to your customers new realities without divorcing the relationship and cutting off communication. Work with your marketing partners to find more cost-effective solutions that keep the customer dialog and relationship going. Find ways to add value better than cutting your price.

Those who say it can’t be done do not deserve the title of Marketing. Marketing is the meeting point of customer need and product supply. There is always a way to communicate value that supports this relationship connectivity. You may have to be more creative and give up on some of your personal goals achievement in the short term. But, customer-centric marketing establishes loyalty, frequency and continuity as its scale of success. If you cannot align your business to a customer’s values in an economic downturn then you are a goals-driven enterprise and you will be punished by your shareholders at some point for failing to engage customers over the long haul.

That’s when the vicious cycle comes and bites you where it really hurts – at the peak of your career development.

Written By |Marketing Strategy|Comments Off on The Vicious Circle of the Marketing Cycle
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