YouGov and Marketing Week’s “Lessons for 2013” event was told last night that most successful brands this year will be those that have an obsessive focus on their customers, do the basics well and have a purpose beyond selling.
The panel of YouGov’s Tim Britton, Marketing Week’s Ruth Mortimer, AMV BBDO’s Cilla Snowball and Samsung’s Andrew Garrihy discussed what lessons can be learned from the best brands of 2012. Tim Britton believed the most important thing he drew from 2012 was that brands should “stick to their knitting”, saying those that do the simple things have fared best. “Those that stick to the basics and do the basics well are guaranteed a degree of success,” he said.
Cilla Snowball said her main insight for the year ahead was that “brand value plus brand values are the new deal with the consumer, and they equal trust.” She said that many brands that had a successful 2012 were those that evolved, arguing that long-running campaigns can demonstrate that consistency pays. “My view is if we can build and adapt existing campaigns to embrace and activate social and digital, if we can identify and execute killer insight with mass audiences, locally and globally, we will…drive good to great in 2013.”
Discussing Samsung’s stellar year as an Olympic sponsor, Andrew Garrihy argued that the brand’s success during 2012 was due to its brand ethos. “For a brand to be truly great, it has to be aligned behind a higher purpose. It has to pursue the activation of that purpose in a really authentic manner. The brand has to be generous, humble, relentless, passionate and successful,” he said. “A lot of it is about sticking to that ideal; being a brand that is about giving people opportunity, being generous, focussing on what we are good at around innovation.”
The future of marketing
The panel also discussed the challenges facing marketers in 2013. Ruth Mortimer suggested there is always a danger that “marketers are seen as an over-head or a cost and not a revenue generating function.” Agreeing, Cilla Snowball argued that the industry needed to “make sure that marketing budgets are protected and are not just a reserve that can be raided in tough times.”
Andrew Garrihy believed that with the economy as it is and money tight, 2013 was the year when the marketing departments had to prove they were delivering real value as a function. “This year, more than ever it’s about being more accountable and really focussing on the numbers and on the return,” he said. “Never before have companies needed marketers like they need them now. But we need to help them understand that.”
Evidence gathering
With expansions into newer marketing disciplines such as digital likely to gather pace this year, the Samsung marketing chief advised marketers to be clever with their strategy. “The only advice I would give is: start small and influence from that circle. Get a couple of quick wins around some smaller programmes and the momentum will build,” he said. “If you get some small bits of evidence it will grow quickly.”
Cilla Snowball emphasised the importance of getting evidence of successful marketing, stating that “without ROI information you can’t expect to make a case for a budget, especially in this climate.” Tim Britton said that marketers have to have a clear plan for gathering this evidence from the start of a campaign. “If from the beginning you set out to track the KPIs that will result in sales and also those around engagement in brand then you can build a cogent business case. But it has to be there from the start.”
