Brand spend on top
A snippet of research we got sent by The Marketing Forum got us talking this morning. To entice us along to sell our wares at their annual clients and suppliers jamboree they shared their findings on the top product and service areas in which clients at the 2011 Marketing Forum are looking to purchase.
What surprised us was branding taking top position and digital taking 6th.
1. Branding
2. Advertising/creative
3. Media
4. Communications & PR
5. Design
6. Digital
7. Market research / customer insight
8. Direct marketing
9. Marketing consultancy
10. CRM
Segmenting areas of marketing like this is never clear cut as so much overlap exists between the categories. Indeed it’s particularly difficult to talk brand or any form of marketing these days without digital being in the next sentence (should we perhaps do away with the digital term now?).
But if the definition of the brand category by The Marketing Forum is brand thinking, rather than delivery, the fact it’s come top of the list shines an interesting light on the mind set of UK companies still weathering the storm of an unsettled and indeterminable economy.
Following some restructuring, redundancies and cost cutting leaner companies could be looking to revitalised brands as a source of solid growth.
Whether it’s a repositioning a company is after, a refresh or complete rebrand, investment in employee engagement in what the brand is and how employees deliver it shouldn’t be far behind. But we wonder, does employee engagement fall into The Marketing Forum’s brand category?
We hope so – or if not in the Forum’s definition of category, at least in the client respondents’ thinking. For brand money will be ill spent if employees aren’t on board.
When confidence is low but expectations are high, employees need good reasons to believe in a more positive future and clear demonstrations of their role within it. And new directions lead by brand will only be believed if delivered by leaders who know how much brand matters. So some of that brand spend may have to go into engaging leaders, in fact.