Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

My son is about to start his GCSEs.

[Just let me pause at that point while all over 40s lament the demise of O' Levels, and how everyone these days get A-star GCSEs for just turning up to school.]

He’s taking maths, like everyone else, because it is compulsory. Like long hair, l33t speak and  not tidying your teenage bedroom.

Over the school holidays in between the joys of summer camp, foreign travel and the huge global community that is his facebook friends list, he has been working through some maths papers, the better to prepare for next term.

[I'll pause again to duck the torrent of teenage angst at blowing his cred with his mates for doing school work when there are perfectly good music tracks to rip to CD, raves to plan, and parent-avoiding parties to sort out]

I had a look at his Maths papers. Now I did Maths A’ Level (and they were much more difficult in my day……), but I have to confess, that even at 14, he is going beyond what I can remember or understand.

Sticking with simpler stuff, there is a mathematical formula that helps understand the importance of every element of the planning, producing and implementing a marketing campaign.

Think of the success of a particular marketing campaign as a function of many variables: product quality, market growth, customer spending patterns, stock availability, competitive action, marketing noise/distractions, service quality…..before we even get to the creative quality of the ad or the focus and clarity of the message. I have written many times about the importance of actually being able to deliver the product or service you are promoting.

I guess my maths point is that the overall success of the campaign is a the result of a multiplicative function. If all of the variables are good, the overall result will be good.

But if just one of the variables is weak, or indeed zero, the end result will still be zero.

Let me spell out what I mean. Think of measuring each variable (e.g award winning creative treatment, or stock availability) on a scale from 0% to 100% where the low end of the scale is zero e.g no product availability (you can’t find it anywhere), and 100% means it is ubiquitous (you can’t even turn around instore or online without falling over it).

Try it:

100% x 100% x 100% x 100% x 100% x 100%……[you get the idea]…..x 100%  = 100%

ie 100% success, the best result you could possibly get.

You get one thing wrong, (e.g. your product is out of stock, your service capacity is down because of server problems or staff shortages), then substitute a 0% for one of the 100%s, and the answer is 0%.

100% x 100% x 100% x   0%   x 100% x 100% ……………….. x 100%  = 0%

ie 0% success. Zero. Nil. Zilch.

So any one element of the marketing mix, any facet of the customer purchase decision, and single piece of the overall jigsaw can ruin your result, no matter how brilliantly you sorted everything else.

It can be the unglamourous stuff that cocks it up for us too. Great product, brilliant strategy, beautiful messaging, spot-on segmentation and audience preparation, then terrible production means the ad is out of focus on the page. Or great concept for a market share boost, superb negotiation with retailers re gondola-end placing, fantastic new product extension, let down by a point of sale technical fault meaning the product falls over on shelf and looks crap.

So forget the detail being boring, it’s really exciting when these guys look after the detail that often gets overlooked, and these bright young things know how to make it really work in the last 10 seconds before a customer decides what to buy.