Tag Archives: recession

Marketing during the Recession, Golden Rule #6: Expose and Explain your Brands and Products Value for Money

When times are tough and consumers feel that products are too expensive (see OTO Research report on price perception during the recession), the role of the brand is also to justify the value for money. Quite often, marketers know their product so well that the full detail of tangible and intangible benefits linked to a product or service seems boring to them… But today it has become key for consumers. There is a cultural issue around this. For years, the core discipline of marketing was to find THE best insight that worked, mainly because the channels used to reach consumers imposed to have ONE clear message. Today, leveraging integration between On Line and Off Line, it is possible to have ONE global promise, but also the detail of FULL benefits. As an example, one could consider the Simpleo (Debitel/SFR) campaign in France. The core of the promise is cheaper mobile communications through simplicity. With this player, you can’t have e-mails, music, videos, web services, just a phone, voice and SMS. This is why the cost is optimized, but it’s also why consumers can understand the real value for money: high quality voice and SMS services at a low cost, and the certainty to only pay what they effectively need. Behind the promise, there is on their website a full detail of what consumers can really get for their money. As a result, Simpleo has conversion ratios well above competitors on this market.

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Jérôme TOUCHEBOEUF, FullSIX France Founding Partner
Jérôme has been working for more than 15 years in the interactive communication field. From 1990 to 1996, he was appointed, consecutively, Account Manager and Business Development Manager for “ Dialogue ” (ex- Procis), the below the line communication agency of the Publicis Group. He then participated in the creation and development of two interactive communication agencies (Publicis Technologies and Ogilvy Interactive) and, then in 1997, founded FullSIX.

Jerome is responsible for the global strategy of FullSIX. He manages consulting projects, as well as marketing initiatives for its clients in many different fields, such as media and leisure (Fnac, WoW, PSG), high tech and TLC (Dell, SFR, Debitel, Gemalto), and FMCG (Remy Cointreau, Pernod Ricard, Danone), Services (Bred, … ).

In 2008, Jérôme Toucheboeuf was appointed vice president of the AACC Marketing Services Department.

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12 February 2009
  • jt
  • [FullSIX Paris]

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Marketing during the Recession, Golden Rule #5: Identify and Leverage your Zero Cost Marketing Assets First

Most companies have a great number of zero cost assets that they do not leverage to the maximum. Obvious examples are: the brand / company website, consumer databases, proprietary locations, on pack… What is less obvious is how you make the most out of these zero cost assets. Many websites still have bounce rates superior to 50%… Meaning than more than 50% of visitors leave the site without seeing anything else than the homepage. Considering that by market standards a visitor costs around $1, one can imagine the ROI impact of working on this bounce rate. Another often mis-managed asset is Web Analytics. What a Marketing Manager can learn about his brand or product by analyzing the behavioural data consumers leave on a site is enormous and quite often surprisingly predictive. In most cases, one can predict the success of a product just by looking at the online audience. By analyzing Online audience and sales for one of our clients, we realized that a specific product was picking up much faster than others, and that helped changed the investment budgets to focus on this product on all channels and more than triple the efficiency of the overall launch campaign…

An example of a less obvious zero cost asset is the Brand Name. Most consumers search Online by using brand names. Too many brands don’t consider that and do not focus on the way to make sure that people that search for them effectively find them and go to their website.

Other very efficient low cost assets that are usually forgotten are Brand Ambassadors as well as company employees. They have a crucial role to play not only in spreading positive feedback around the Internet, but also in directly recruiting clients or other ambassadors (see rule #9). Bottom line, based on actual experience, for a mid size campaign, the full leverage of zero cost assets can represent up to 25% additional ROI on integrated campaigns.

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Stephan MONTIGAUD, Managing Director FullSIX China
Stephan oversees FullSIX activities over South-East Asia, managing local clients services for global accounts (L’Oreal, Club Med, Remy Cointreau) and developing business throughout the region (Schindler, Ferrari).

Stéphan started his career in 1995 at Publicis as a project manager and interactive marketing consultant working on the accounts Renault, Dunod/Bordas, and Radio France. From 1996 to 1997 he developed his technical expertise at the W3C (Massachussets Institute of Technology), the research laboratory in charge of defining web technology standards. Early 1998 he joins FullSIX to take charge of the development of interactive marketing capabilities for the Paris office.

Until 2004 he was a Managing Partner of FullSIX France, participating to strategic planning and providing clients services in relationship marketing to local and international accounts

Stephan graduated from Ecole Centrale de Paris, Ecole des Mines de Paris and holds an MBA degree from INSEAD.

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10 February 2009

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Marketing during the Recession, Golden Rule #4: Escape from the Middle

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As identified in the OTO Research report about consumer reaction to the crisis, 80% of consumers are going to change their spending habits. 89% of consumers are going to systematically check online what and where the best products are, and what their value for money is. These are impressive proportions, indicating radical and disruptive changes. But when you dig further, consumers are getting savvy in the way they cut their spending. They will continue to spend on some categories, while cutting on others. They will accept lower quality for a better price on some categories and not on others. 84 % of consumers will cut heavily on less than two categories.

Cut heavily on one or two categories, reduce price and quality on some others to maintain or increase spending on one or two “protected categories”. Category behavior depends on each and every single consumer, but most consumers are polarizing their choices. So the key challenge for brands is to escape from the middle market. Choose between targeting the heavy spenders and offer them premium products, or target the “quality traders” and go to them with a low cost offering. Where there will not be any drive is the mid quality, mid priced offers, because consumers will use digital to compare. How does one convince a consumer that an average $20,000 berline has a stronger emotional benefit than a $10,000 sedan? Considering what one can do with $10,000…

Escaping from the middle means focusing budgets on the high and low end, but also heavily on customer intelligence and delivering the right offer and message to the right consumer at the appropriate moment. This approach can usually make a 30% difference in performance on every Dollar invested.

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THIBAUT PORTAL - International Partner FullSIX Group
Thibaut has started is professional career in Asia, as an international buyer for a French retail chain store – The Casino Group.
In 1999, he has joined the FullSIX Group, in the early days of its creation and has been manager in FullSIX Paris for 4 years, working for clients such as Vodafone, the FIAT group and the Mars Group.

In 2003, he has left France for Italy, joining FullSIX Italy as a managing partner. He was in charge of business and new innovative marketing ideas development, meanly working for Bulgari, Alfa Romeo, the Mars Group, Telecom Italia.

In April 2008, he has joined Six and Co UK as CEO & international partner for the FullSIX Group

Main photo: © A Different Perspective

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9 February 2009

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Marketing during the Recession, Golden Rule #3: Build Trust and Confidence through Clarity and Transparency

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In early 2008, we learned that 61% of European consumers thought advertisers did not treat them with respect, and that 69% were ready to pay for a service that would help them skip advertising. In October 2008, the research conducted by OTO Research just after the financial crisis shows that 83% of consumers do not trust the brands they use, and that more than 50% believe the price is not fair on basic needs categories (66% on food…). But there are solutions for brands to re-gain trust during this recession.

Beyond re-focusing on creative but understandable, reality rooted, simple advertising (moving away from the just funny, impactful, over promises), consumers will want to have clear data about the brand, what it truly stands for and what is the value for money of its products and services. To achieve this, most (but not all, see the Simpleo example in rule 6) of the solutions are Online. Clear, understandable, dialog oriented websites. eCRM platforms that address consumer needs and concerns.

A crucial factor is what consumers say and write about brands. 54% of consumers say that their primary source of information when choosing a brand is the Consumer Generated Content about the product and brand experience. Even for the mythical iPhone, a site like PleaseFixtheiPhone built by* and for iPhone addicts proposed to users to list the product flaws and begs Steve Jobs to fix them. More than 250,000 votes and 1,600 posts in less than a week… Managing this kind of transparent information will be vital in this recession.

*Full disclosure: PleaseFixtheiPhone was built by the FullSIX NYC team

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5 February 2009

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Marketing During the Recession, Golden Rule #2: Define Clear and Measurable KPIs that Link to ROI

Defining marketing KPIs is not always as simple as it sounds. Strong marketing KPIs should be 5 to 10 maximum (that is what the Key stands for), and should link to ROI (that is what the Performance Indicator stands for). Defining few but clearly ROI driven KPIs implies having a clear strategic vision of how marketing contributes to sales and bottom line. As an example, Awareness (% of target that know the brand) is clearly measurable but has no direct link to sales or costs, and therefore to ROI. Relationship (% of target that has a relationship with the brand) is also measurable and has a direct impact on sales and costs. For a specific brand, consumers that are in the Relationship mode cost less to talk to (25 to 30% less) and buy more products (25% to 35%). Therefore, Relationship is a KPI that links to ROI. Setting the appropriate set of KPIs and building the most efficient tracking tools to measure them across all actions is the key to measurable and manageable marketing, and therefore to strategically manage your budgets and efforts. This has become achievable in the past few years for all marketing and communications fields, but has become an urgent imperative during this crisis.

For further information about KPIs elaboration and the Engagement Index, please refer to the Engagement Index & ISARA presentation.

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Pierre Santamaria - OTO Research General Manager
After starting at the BNP as a financial controller from 1991 to 1993, Pierre Santamaria (ESCP / Dauphine) joined Altist, a management consulting firm, where he designed and managed the new technology activities until 1998. From 1999 to 2006, he founded(is this right?) the Columbus Consulting Firm, where he ran many projects for major clients such as Nouvelles Frontières, BRED, Société Générale, France Telecom and EDF. In 2007, he was appointed by Rafi Haladjian General Manager of Ozone, the Wi-Fi metropolitan operator to manage the company’s merger with Neuf Telecom. In 2007 he became General Manager of OTO Research, the new generation research Institute of FullSIX Group, where he is in charge with the development of tools, services and ad hoc solutions, aimed at approaching the market from an innovative point of view.

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4 February 2009

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