Today businesses and consumers are asking why each expenditure is necessary and what benefits it is intended to yield. This is especially true in advertising. As Rapp and Collins observe in The New Maxi-Marketing, “The proliferation of media choices and the escalation of media costs have increased the need for truly accountable advertising expenditure…All advertising, whether by image-building brand advertisers or by direct marketers, must be fully accountable.”
This accountability starts with having specific measurable objectives and ends with evaluating whether those objectives were achieved by the promotional methods used. As business becomes more sophisticated and accountability continues to increase, impulse purchases of promotional products will diminish. This will lead to more competition in the product sales arena.
The new bottom line. If there is one pervasive question that seems to run through every business relationship it is, “What have you done for me lately?”
The good news is that program selling can answer that question.
Marketing
advertising, budget
The only problem is you don’t know which 50%! Or at least that is how the old saying goes. I often hear people rave about tracking systems and talk about how they can gather all of this statistical information about the marketing they use. That is great, I love statistics especially when they point in my direction. But why limit yourself to marketing campaigns that are trackable?
Place one phone number in the newspaper ads and another in the TV spots. Now that is an easy way to track which piece of marketing was that last to be seen before the call was made. If you are weighing the ROI of TV vs Print then this would be a great methodology for tracking the results. For the Internet you can compare click-through rates for different ad copies.
But what about Branding? This is a broader spectrum and more difficult to measure. How do you measure the effectiveness of the embroidered shirt on the Bank teller, your logo on a nice pen, or the goodwill generated by the holiday cards you send out every year? These have to be measured on a much more subjective level.
We work with one company who has shifted their entire marketing budget away from print and moved it to promotional products and flying their customers to nice resorts and holding golf tournaments. This way they have a captive audience and a happy client either way it shakes out. Sure, most businesses can’t operate in this fashion, but if you are selling large enough contract then this is the way to go. It is targeted and measurable. They either buy or they don’t 
Marketing, Promotional Products, ROI
advertising, Marketing, promotion, statistics
