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:

Mystical Secret 1—Planning: Everybody plans their marcom, so that’s no big secret. The secret is to plan with cost controls built into the strategy, into the creative execution, and into the production.

But be careful. It’s not enough to say, “Hey, we can’t afford a four-color job,” especially if you really need a four-color job. That’s not planning; that’s surrender.

At Harding, we expect everyone in the place to do their job with cost implications in mind. That means the writers and designers as well as the project managers, web designers, and production experts. For example, it’s amazing how much a writer can cut costs on a Flash assignment simply by using one voice-over announcer instead of two.

Mystical Secret 2—Knowledge: Every medium is different, with different factors affecting costs. The same writer who saves money by using only one announcer for a Flash production might waste it on a website homepage. Unless, that is, the writer understands the medium.

Considering the variety of media we all use these days—print, Flash, InDesign, desktop, HTML, interactive Web design, and everything else—it’s a daunting task. And almost nobody knows everything.

At Harding, we have a handy way to undaunt ourselves: we talk to each other. With more than a hundred marcom professionals in San Jose, California; Grenoble, France; and various points in between, it’s almost inevitable that more than one of us knows the turf.

For example, Harding technical wizards know the Web so well that they built a kind of search engine Google uses for its own marcom efforts. Yes, that Google—home of the world’s premier search engine. It’s called NetMarcom, by the way. And if you’re an international marketer, it could very well save you a ton of money. In fact, it saved $1.3 million in just a year for one user.

Mystical Secret 3—Great sources: At Harding, we’re an international agency working for multi-national corporations. That means the world is not only our oyster; it’s our supplier shortlist, too.

Want an example? We have an award-winning source for Flash production in the Philippines. True, they work when most of us in the States are asleep. But no matter: Harding creative people are willing to check their emails—in the middle of the night, if necessary.

More important, our Philippine colleagues are very good. They’re also very responsive. And they are very–okay, not exactly cheap; let’s say reasonable. In short, a low-cost option with high-quality results.

All of which leads us back to the same question we asked at the beginning: How much less are you willing to pay for higher-quality marcom?

One way to find out is to talk with us about an upcoming marcom project. Even better, ask us to bid on it. Either way, there’s no cost at all to click michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com in San Jose, CA. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, click stephane_labartino@hardingmarcom.fr.

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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.

Since it’s our job to help you maximize your marketing budget, we’d like to offer some suggestions, starting with an overview of the problems. We think there are three that stand out.

1. Media segmentation
2. Product lifecycles
3. Customer attention span

It’s clearly wonderful to have about a trillion channels our parents never watched. And who doesn’t rejoice at having one magazine for trout fishermen and another for bass fans? For that matter, who isn’t thrilled that blogs, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook give us all something to do at 3:00 AM?

But building awareness takes constant repetition among a large group of people.

And that’s no snap these days. Media segmentation gives your target audience an almost infinite number of choices. So whichever you pick, your target is probably looking at something else. The result: It takes a budget the size of all outdoors, including nearby parsecs, to get the reach and frequency you need. And never mind that you’re also paying for a whole bunch of viewers, readers, and listeners you don’t really want. They tag along because… well, because.

As to shorter product lifecycles, consider this: Ivory Soap was invented way back in 1879. That means P&G had 130 years to gently slide its slogan into our brains. As a comparison, the technology industry is built on having something new every few minutes. How much time did 8-track players have to create a brand? Or floppy disks? The answer: Slightly less than it takes to lose at Pac-Man.

Even worse, your prospects now have less time to spend on ads. If they’re not Tweeting their innermost thoughts or making videos for YouTube, they’re off to cooking class, book group, soccer practice, and Mensa meetings. Or spending crazy-long hours commuting.

Want proof? At its peak in the 1980s, The Bill Cosby Show drew 50 million viewers a show. American Idol averages 40% less. Newspapers and magazines are dying all over the place. And instead of listening to the radio, your target market is updating its playlist.

At Harding, we think the answer to these three problems lies in the ultimate marketing machine: collateral. By shifting more of your budget to marcom collateral, you give yourself the flexibility to turn the problems into positives.

First, collateral can pinpoint your market—with almost no waste circulation. You can target email and DM to actual prospects, by name if you like. People pick up your brochures because they’re interested in what you have to say. Same goes for people who hit your website, download your white paper, read your blog, or watch your Flash presentation.

Second, collateral lets you change your message as your message changes. Online copy can be revised in a virtual instant. And today’s printing technology is so sophisticated, you can update your marcom materials faster than you can update your product.

Third, when people examine your collateral, they’re focused on you. They’re not idly thumbing through a magazine or passively watching TV, they’re involved in a personal search for hard information about your company and your products.

But most important is that tight money thing. Collateral production costs tend to be far less than making commercials or print ads. And the media costs—for time or space—are roughly zero. So net-net, bottom line, at the end of the day, collateral turns out to be an enormously cost-effective way to put your marketing budget to work.

Which leads us to a key part of any marcom piece—the call to action. If you’d like to talk about ways to give your marketing budget a little more snap, crackle, and pop, so would we. Just let your fingers do the walking and email michelle_contreras@hardingmarketing.com. Or to reach our office in Grenoble, France, try stephane_labartino@hardingmarketing.com.

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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).

Here’s what that means in practice. Let’s suppose an engineer in Bangalore makes a change to part number 21057-C. She can use NetMarcom to update the stored spec sheet before they get up for breakfast in Schenectady, where accounting sees what’s happened and drops the price. Meanwhile in Chicago, marketing decides this calls for new benefit copy. Which is approved by legal in New York, then published in local languages to be read by customers in Marseilles, Boston, Cairo, Berlin, Vladivostok, Brasilia, and Kuala Lumpur.

How long does it take to cut marcom costs using the Web? It could be roughly 1.3752 nanoseconds, unless the writer is like most writers and wastes precious time trying to find just the right words. In that case, all the revisions, updates, and reviews might fritter away a whole day. Or two. Or perhaps a week if someone important is on vacation.

Our clients used the simplicity and speed of NetMarcom templates to automatically produce PDFs on the fly. Yet they were able maintain their corporate branding standards without running off to the graphics department for new layouts every time there was a revision.

This not only saved a ton of time, it helped save $1,375,300.

We’re proud of that. We’re also proud that this client isn’t the only major enterprise saving money with NetMarcom. At HP Services, NetMarcom standardizes the workflow and decreases timelines. It produces better data sheets for HP Managed Services, and makes it possible to localize content templates for HP Education. HP also uses NetMarcom to manage promotional materials and catalogs throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—publishing updated price lists and automatically translating everything into 19 languages. Down at ground level, HP sales reps use NetMarcom to create custom product information sheets for retailers who sell HP printers and computers.

I doubt I need to mention that cutting costs has become a high priority these days. That’s why it’s so important for marcom people to know about a simple tool—simple to apply and simple to use—that can save them and their companies so much money: NetMarcom.

If you have major marcom projects to manage, just email me at amy_schmidt@hardingmarketing.com. I can tell you more about NetMarcom, and together, we can probably work up some very satisfying numbers.

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.

The New Yorker says an economist studied firms that either increased their ad budgets or held them steady during the recession of 1921–22. He found that those companies did “significantly better” at maintaining sales than those that didn’t. But 1921–22 was a long time ago. What about more recent economic black holes?

Looking hard at various fiscal meltdowns, scholars have uncovered what appears to be a pattern. For instance, in the 1981–82 recession, businesses that increased their ad budgets—or avoided cuts—grew “precipitously” over the ensuing three years of turnaround. By contrast, companies that trimmed their budgets saw only modest gains when the economy returned to leaping and bounding status.

And when McKinsey studied corporate spending during the slump of 1990–91, they discovered that firms that came through at the top of their industries had increased their budgets for acquisitions, R&D, and—here’s the key point (in case we haven’t been obvious enough)—advertising. Companies that reduced those budgets ended up at the bottom.

All this scholarly data mining raises an interesting question: Why is maintaining advertising and marketing budgets such a good idea for bad times?

Maybe it’s that “conventional wisdom” thing. In good times, marcom budgets are (relatively) generous. So everyone’s elbowing everyone else in a crowd of marketers, all metaphorically shouting and waving their arms at once. But in bad times, conventional wisdom decides to cut many of those same budgets. So any company that continues to advertise, promote, and otherwise marketing communicate has the field pretty much to itself.

When you’re shouting and waving while standing alone in a field, you do get noticed—the dream of marcom executives everywhere. And for all we know, it’s the reason Apple introduced the iPod during the depths of the dot-com bust of 2001.

Even so, marcom executives don’t always control their marcom budgets. We understand. In a world of tough choices, it’s everyone’s responsibility to make the most of whatever budget is available.

That’s what we do at Harding Marketing. Whatever your budget is, our job is to help you achieve your objectives—on budget, on time, on target, and, if necessary, on the fly.

It seems like a fairly simple goal, but it’s a sometimes difficult task. Yet we’ve been pulling it off for Hewlett-Packard, Symantec, Google, and a host of other companies—high tech and low, big and small, in San Jose and in Grenoble, France—for over 27 years. And we’ll keep on pulling it off throughout this not-so-Great Recession.

If you like to know more about us, please visit our site at hardingmarketing.com.