Double-entry advertising accounting

Most companies practise a kind of dual advertising accounting. They separate their measures into those for image cultivation with traditional advertising and those for achieving sales with online advertising. Campaigns, budgets and entire departments are managed twice. Why is that? After all, we are living in an economic crisis. Henry Ford, co-founder of modern marketing, was already of the opinion that 50 percent of marketing expenditure could be saved. Entire generations have been dealing with the 50 percent question ever since. Now it's our turn. And the prospects of finally finding out are better than ever. This is because the shift of the opinion-forming process to digital, mobile and social communication channels makes it possible to disclose the decision-making process when making a purchase. From the first contact to the final purchase decision. Let me explain the 50 percent savings question using the current health insurance advertising. Fall is contract time. There is currently a great deal of acquisition fever in the specialist departments of the health insurance companies. The insurers have realized that customers have turned to new sources of information. Online portals, for example. At an online advertising event, the online manager of a large health insurance fund presented performance figures for the current nationwide campaign. He showed the number of contracts concluded and from which media channels the impulses came. In general, only a few contracts were concluded despite the wide range of media used. The performance of the 30-second commercial was also measured. The commercial did not contain any references that would have offered interested viewers the way to further information. A web address, for example. The online boss said with a shrug of the shoulders that image and sales targets were consistently separated. The advertising department, which operates separately from the online department, had made this decision. At SF1, the 30-second spot achieved four contracts after one week of prime time. The performance measurement took place for the first time, and it will be interesting to see which advertising measures the insurance company decides on in 2013. Back to the economic crisis. The message is to achieve more impact with fewer resources. There are a few reasonably tried and tested applications from which five rules can be derived.

Rule 1 - Integrated impact requires an integrated organization.

Duplicate campaign and department management drives up costs and slows down the impact. TV-dominated image advertising and online-dominated trade and sales advertising should therefore no longer be managed as separate organizational units. If a merger is not immediately possible at departmental level - people are attached to their little gardens - then you can do so by running fully integrated performance campaigns from now on and joining together in cross-divisional project groups as a makeshift solution.

Rule 2 - After five contacts, it's over.

After three to a maximum of five contacts, you should have reached the recipients of your advertising message. Anything more is wasted contact effort and far too expensive. This is the result of a study by the American market research institute Edelman. If your stakeholders have still not seen or understood your message after five contacts, this is due to the content not being interesting enough, the distribution not being precise enough or the creation not having enough impact. In the words of Rivella CEO Erland Brüngger, the concern about a lack of contact efficiency sounds like this: "In terms of advertising, the big challenge is to reach tomorrow's consumers at all in an increasingly heterogeneous and medially complex environment." So if you want to persuade people to change their health insurance or drink Rivella, you don't have to address them ten times with the same advertisement. You need to confront them with the right incentive as few times as possible at the right time.

Rule 3 - The personal experience is paramount.

The annual study conducted by the renowned Reputation Institute provides evidence that the direct personal experience of a stakeholder with a brand is the strongest relationship driver. Therefore, the primary goal of every measure must be to provide people with a personal brand or product experience. The antithesis of the authentic experience is the constructed advertising message. Today, the value of advertising promises can be verified for everyone in real time with buyer testimonials. Personal experiences, on the other hand, require no further verification on the part of the recipient. The value of positive testimonials cannot be outweighed by any marketing message, no matter how expensive and elaborately staged.

Rule 4 - Messages must be narratable.

Have you already landed your first retweets? It's a great feeling when your Twitter message spreads among a third party's followers via a retweet. There is hardly a more efficient form of communication at the moment. Provided your retweeter has a few followers who are potential buyers, employees or investors for you. "Not a single advertising franc, but many surprising stories", is shown in MK issue 10/12 using the Freitag brand as an example. The bags made from recycled material exude "the poetry of the highways" and have "a past life that makes them unique". What is your "Freitag story"? Anyone who thinks that narrative advertising substitutes are reserved for trendy brands with an urban audience is seriously underestimating their own brand portfolio. The best thing to do is to listen to your own customers. They usually have the best success stories to tell.

Rule 5 - The added value is the chocolate on the biscuit.

Do you like Kambly biscuits? "In an environment of increasing interchangeability, a flood of regulation and anonymity, consumers are longing for clearly differentiated, credible and authentic offers with recognizable added value," Oscar Kambly is quoted as saying in Promarca. You can pull out all the stops of modern marketing, follow all the rules listed here and still fail miserably. That is, if you do not offer your stakeholders the prospect of added value in the sense of Oscar Kambly. Working on added value is a team effort across all departmental boundaries. It is the result of collaboration between product developers, product managers, salespeople, marketers and others. With a convincing added value, you have solved half of Henry Ford's 50 percent question. Are you still at 50 percent or are you already approaching the optimum output? I am interested in your strategies, tactics and measures to increase efficiency. Get in touch with your views at www.huerlimanncc.com.

Beat Hürlimann