There are no definitive answers, but various marketing directors, SVPs and CMOs have had success over the past decade with these strategies.
Ask your customers — Take a couple of days to evaluate your position. How do you rate your customer awareness? Is it high enough or do you need to pay attention to your customer maintenance? Is your brand’s value proposition well established, or do you have a diffuse brand image out there? Have you differentiated your brand from your competitors’, or is your brand lost within its category?
A Forrester Research survey showed that most marketing directors forget to define answers to these questions before they start cost-cutting. Far too often, they arbitrarily remove the less ‘safe’ media investments — online, direct marketing and billboard — as an easy cut.
But in doing this blindly, they ignore the untested possibility that one or all of these ostensibly dispensable elements may have been of great value to customer awareness, promoting the brand’s value proposition and its market differentiation.
Be creative — Approach your brand management both tactically and creatively. Orange, for example, offered students in San Francisco a free paint job for their cars. The only condition was that the colour must be the Orange brand’s particular shade. Imagine the cost of this tactic against the value it gained in the streets and in the press. Being creative doesn’t necessarily cost a fortune, but it can save you one.
Don’t forget to build your brand — Some years ago, Shell decided to redirect its total marketing budget into direct marketing from Denmark. The response was great. But, after two years, brand awareness was so low that it was starting to effect sales. Devoting its marketing investment into one media channel didn’t do the trick. And the real danger in the years of this single-channel strategy was the chance that consumers would forget the brand. Remember: by this stage, you’ve probably invested millions of dollars in building your brand over the years. Why destroy that effort and investment by restricting your budget’s application?
Evaluate your partners, but don’t start all over again — A classic cost-cutting manoeuvre is changing suppliers to gain lower prices. This won’t help you in the long run. Your agency, for example, probably has years of experience handling your brand. If you were to switch, you could lose half-a-year’s momentum in just running the pitch again, changing the focus and building a new campaign. Could this possibly be worth a saving of one per cent? I doubt it.
Be consistent — Cost-cutting is no time to change your branding style dramatically. Remember: what consumers really want now is consistency. Consumers want a brand they can trust, believe and count on. And now you’re changing your branding style because you have to save money?
Good luck with your cost-cutting. Only time will tell how well your tactics worked.
Martin Lindstrom is the author of Brand Sense
