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
What Ted does best is increase response by beating controls, applying multiple channels to target markets, profiling customer databases and generally improving sales results using deep direct marketing principles. Regard Ted as your personal “think-tank” for your direct marketing planning and strategy development. After analyzing several hundred million dollars of direct response testing in all channels, he brings with him the knowledge accumulated from seeing what tends to work and what does not. Having worked on both the agency and client side of direct marketing, Ted understands the unique challenges faced by agencies and their clients. Agencies need to sell themselves and deliver sales results. And clients not only require results, but need ideas they can implement while focusing on tracking response using a relational database. If Ted brings nothing else to the table, by profiling customer databases and creating response propensity models, he quickly becomes the clients’ expert on their own customers. His formal training includes a BA from Abilene Christian University and two years of graduate work at Texas Tech University. For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, Ted developed a revolutionary direct mail format that beat most standing direct mail controls for this company. He also generated more profitable business for this firm by expanding compiled list circulation of less than 10% to more than 30% of total direct mail circulation within a year. (Insurance business generated by direct mail demonstrated higher persistency than customers coming from other media such as print and DRTV.) Ted’s plan and implementation of Medicare lead generation campaigns for over 60 regional and national HMO/PPO organizations combined multiple channels that surpassed some sales projections by as much as 60%. Additional industry experience over the last 30 years includes B2B or B2C for finance, securities, home security, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, government, technology, nonprofit, retail, transportation, communications, and multiple categories in the services industry. As the founder of Wyse Direct (a division for Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, OH), he successfully launched and branded a new technology product for Seiko-Mead by supporting a nationwide sales team with a predictable flow of qualified sales leads. While a VP of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, Ted acted as the direct marketing strategist who refocused the agency’s culture to attract new commercial and fundraising accounts. At the time, Grizzard was essentially a direct mail fund raising production operation. His leadership and team building effectiveness prepared Grizzard for the eventual Omnicom acquisition and Grizzard’s successful integration into Omnicom’s large group of advertising agencies. An independent DM consultant, Ted continues to write numerous articles and conduct webinars on direct marketing techniques. He also wrote The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan — A Step-by-Step Guide publishing it through Executive Enterprises in New York City. During his youth, Ted was raised in Lille, France with his missionary family attending French schools becoming fluent in reading and writing French. Away from the job, Ted is a computer geek, blogger and science fiction buff!
http://www.dmcgresults.com
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