Spending Versus investing Your Marketing Dollar

These are tough times. Everyone is trying to find ways to cut costs and operate more efficiently. Perhaps your company has had a layoff in its marketing and PR functions and is contemplating a change in direction. The first thing to find out is: How effective are your organization’s brand awareness and communications programs? How do they stack up against the competition?

Is your brand well recognized by customers, investors and employees? Is it still effective and geared toward the right consumers? Is your logo still fresh and relevant, or does it send the wrong message to the right people? Are your marketing and sales collaterals, signage, corporate communications materials and messages consistent and correctly targeted all across your organization? Are you losing market share to a competitor? Is your perception in the marketplace something you control, or are you leaving that for others to decide? Are your messages driving sales and growth or are they falling flat? Many executives would say, “Now is not the time to mess with our identity; it’s expensive and takes the focus off of our day-to-day operations.”

Those executives don’t work for top-brand companies. Top-brand companies, such as Coca Cola, McDonalds, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson know that their image and what their brand stands for, are of paramount importance, especially in a down economy. Their brand drives sales. So when is the best time to evaluate the above questions? Yesterday!

-Posted by John Sr. 10/15/09