Your marketing is more expensive than you think. There are the direct costs of your marketing team and the money you spend to buy services like design, copy and channel space. But there are also the opportunity costs you incur when unsuccessful marketing means forgoing the sales and profits you might have achieved.
Like all costs, direct and opportunity costs eat into your brand’s profit margins, but your CEO authorises these only if it is thought they are an investment that will bring a return.
But ineffective marketing is, in the words of one CEO I interviewed, a ‘wombat’; a waste of money, brains and time that clients won’t pay for and that reflects badly on you. In this series of articles, I’ll share what my research has taught me about the four steps to avoiding wombat marketing, beginning with the first, setting the marketing objectives that guide everything else that follows.
The ‘where’ and the ‘what’
Ask many brand managers what their marketing objectives are and you will get a vague answer such as ‘to raise awareness’ or ‘communicate brand values’. More quantitively minded marketers might give you ‘SMART’ targets for brand recognition or leads generated. But neither form does what marketing objectives are supposed to do, which is to provide unambiguous guidance for future marketing and marketing-related activity. Instead, these imprecise marketing objectives make it much harder to select agencies, brief them and execute compelling campaigns. Worse still, vague objectives make it harder for medical affairs, market access and other teams to develop programmes that complement marketing team activities. By contrast, strong marketing objectives guide the marketers and their agencies and enable cross-functional complementarity. To achieve that, they must include two essential components: the ‘where’ and the ‘what’.
The ‘where’ of a marketing objective must describe the situations on which marketing efforts will be focused. In today’s multi-stakeholder markets, that definition begins with the type of patient, but must also include the type of healthcare professional and the payer context. I described this ‘contextual segmentation’ approach and how it replaces less sophisticated segmentation methods, in an earlier PME article. Effective marketing objectives include a rich description of one or more market situations in terms of the needs, motivations and behaviours of each stakeholder.
The ‘what’ of the marketing objective must describe the changes the marketing effort intends to bring about in each of the defined contextual segments. Importantly, these are not the same as commercial objectives (eg, for sales or market share), but reflect what must be true for the commercial objectives to be achievable. Effective marketing objectives make clear how the needs, motivations and behaviours of each segment must be altered by the marketing activity in order to achieve the commercial goals.
Read the article in full here.