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Whatever became of advertising slogans? A lot of us remember when Wheaties was the breakfast of champions, 99 & 44/100% was pure advertising genius, and Avis tried harder. But marketing mind-stickers today? Not so many.
And you’re right: “Got Milk?” is as deft as any of those. But it’s hard to think of many more.
Normal people might shout Hallelujah! at the decline of sloganeering. But at Harding Marketing, we are not normal people; we are marketing communications people. And that caused us to do what marcom people do best: We worried. We worried because building a slogan is a lot like building a brand, a product, or a corporate identity. And judging by the slogan drought, it looks as if building them all is getting tougher.
To put it another way, it’s getting tougher to get full value for your marketing budget—especially if you depend on traditional advertising media like broadcast and magazines. With money tighter than Scrooge and old man Potter put together, that really is something to worry about.
There’s something very satisfying about a specific number. Little kids know that. It’s why they never tell you they’re five; they’re always five-and-a-half. Or almost six. And it’s why mathematicians spend decades trying to compute every last digit of pi—crunching numbers out to the edge of the universe.
It’s also why I’m proud to report that NetMarcom, the proprietary, Web-based content management and publishing solution from Harding Marketing Communications, helped one of our clients, a multinational technology company, cut marcom costs $1,375,300 just last year. Not “over a million.” Not even 1.3 million. But precisely $1,375,300.
Even if that’s not digits out to the edge of the universe, it makes a very satisfying point: NetMarcom is able to save huge piles of money for an enterprise with major marcom projects to manage. But that doesn’t explain how. Since we’re the ones who invented the thing, I’ll give it a try.
NetMarcom helps your business use the net to create all kinds of marketing communications: brochures, spec sheets, blogs, white papers, ads, etc., etc. With NetMarcom, people throughout your organization can enter approved copy once, publish it in almost any format (while maintaining your graphic standards), review work via the Web, revise and update it, translate for folks around the world, and store the finished materials. Anybody (at least anybody you authorize) can access NetMarcom at any time from anywhere (at least anywhere there’s a Web connection).
Hard times mean hard choices. Somebody said that, so it must be true. The current hard-times mean many businesses are making the hard choice to cut through their marcom budgets like a chainsaw plowing through pudding.
It’s called “conventional wisdom.” But even if it is conventional, it might not be wisdom.
There happens to be hard, statistical evidence that says it’s a good idea to keep your marketing budget up, even when the economy’s down. More to the point, for any business that wants to get a jumpstart on the inevitable recovery, bad times might be a good time to boost their budgets for brochures, spec sheets, white papers, email blasts, and advertising. Even without a bailout.
For example, a short article in the April 20 issue of The New Yorker included some interesting arguments to use when you’re standing toe to toe with management as they instruct you to donate more of your budget to the bottom line. Admittedly, The New Yorker is not an authorized source for business advice. And it has its own agenda when it comes to advertising budgets. Come to think of it, so do we. Yet facts are facts, and these days a business ignores them at its peril.
Controlling marcom costs: why stretching your budget isn’t a stretch
07/07/2010 in Budgets, MarComments | Tags: Marcom, Marketing, Multimedia | by Harding Marketing | Leave a comment
How much less are you willing to pay for higher-quality marcom?
And no, that’s not a typo—we’re talking about more for less. It’s not just the goal of marcom executives everywhere; for some of them, it’s a practical reality.
For example, HP, Google, and Symantec all have very big marcom budgets—maybe much bigger than yours. But they might be spending less per execution than you are—while still getting enviable creative and production quality. And there’s no magic, funny accounting, or alternative reality involved.
It doesn’t seem fair, does it?
At Harding Marketing we work with all three of those companies—and many others equally adept at controlling costs. So we know what it takes to achieve more for less. It takes a rigorous, systematic approach to marcom creative and production, that’s what. But that sounds awfully stuffy, so let’s call it:
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