Ever Wonder Who Makes These Great Marketing Decisions?

Written By Ted Grigg

Here’s the story …

I’m driving down the road during lunch hour and hear a radio spot from a well-known printing press manufacturing company promoting a new digital printing press that I know sells for well over $300,000.

The spot talks about the machine’s high speed, large volume capacity and quality printing using terms that are most familiar to press foremen than consumers. You can imagine where I am going with this by now.

Have you ever wondered who makes the media buying decisions for these highly targetable products? A professional direct marketer certainly did not make it. The wasted circulation using a consumer based radio station to sell high-end equipment to highly targetable business purchasers is folly.

There are excellent contact mailing and phone lists available for rental to target 95%+ of the market for this product.

The decision makers on the general agency or client side who do not need to validate expenses based on sales results wanted to get the word out. “This new spot will achieve our branding objectives” or some such nonsense is somehow supposed to make this radio campaign a good decision.

If this were part of a larger strategy, then perhaps one could stretch the reasoning stating that it was a support campaign for outbound telemarketing or a direct mail lead generation campaign. But this is rarely the case.

The objective for any advertising expenditure had to include selling a given quantity of these machines over a specified period of time. Throwing money at general awareness advertising to move a small list of influencers and prospects to purchase a $300,000 commercial printing machine makes no sense.

If the planners wanted to soften the market for their sales people to purchase the machine, then a direct response campaign using the same dollars would do this more intensely and with far better results than an awareness campaign.

Why do chief marketing officers and their managers continue to allow these kinds of decisions to happen? Branding is critical, but is this the best way to support the brand, by sacrificing sales for the good of the company? Or did the strategists on this campaign somehow believe that announcements on a 15 second radio spot without of an offer have a ghost of a chance of moving the sales needle in any significant way? Can you see a rationale for this approach that might make this radio campaign a reasonable proposition?

Ted Grigg

Ted Grigg is a direct response strategist who helps growth-focused companies reduce risk by identifying weak assumptions before they become costly mistakes.

Over the course of his career, Ted has evaluated several hundred million dollars in direct response testing across direct mail, digital, print, television, telephone, and other channels. His work combines direct response strategy, acquisition economics, customer analysis, creative evaluation, offer development, and disciplined testing.

Ted has worked on both the client and agency sides of the business. That experience gives him a practical understanding of the pressures facing executives, marketing teams, agencies, and service providers—and of the problems that arise when activity, media volume, or creative preference replaces a clear economic objective.

His consulting work helps organizations examine such questions as:

  • Are acquisition goals economically realistic?

  • Is the allowable Cost Per Sale supported by customer value?

  • Are targeting, offers, creative, media, and response paths working together?

  • Are tests structured to produce reliable business decisions?

  • Are unproven assumptions being treated as facts?

  • Is the organization measuring sales outcomes rather than convenient proxies?

Ted’s experience includes the development of direct mail and multichannel acquisition programs for insurance, healthcare, financial services, technology, nonprofit, manufacturing, retail, transportation, communications, government, and business-to-business organizations.

For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, he developed a direct mail format that defeated established controls and helped expand the productive use of compiled prospect lists from less than 10 percent to more than 30 percent of total direct mail circulation within one year. He also planned Medicare lead-generation programs for more than 60 regional and national HMO and PPO organizations, with some programs exceeding sales projections by as much as 60 percent.

Ted founded Wyse Direct, a direct marketing division of Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, where he developed acquisition programs and helped launch a new technology product for Seiko Instruments by generating a predictable flow of qualified sales leads for its national sales organization. As vice president of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, he helped broaden the agency’s strategic capabilities and pursue new commercial and fundraising opportunities.

He is the author of The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan—A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Executive Enterprises, and has written numerous articles and conducted webinars on direct response strategy, testing, creative development, and marketing economics.

Ted earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Abilene Christian University and completed two years of graduate study at Texas Tech University. He is the founder of DMCG, LLC.

http://www.dmcgresults.com
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