Brands in Years vs 1/4s
A great article in this month's Harvard Business Review talks about building brands and how companies manage to quarterly sales targets (or even shorter) while building brands takes time. Obviously this is an oversimplification -- the full article can be purchased digitally herehttp://tinyurl.com/28fgd4/
This got me thinking about how to make branding and sales work better together... and how so often one is sacrificed for the other. There are opportunities to make them work together, and changing the level of acceptable risk in such scenarios is one of the hardest things a agency or marketer can do.
0 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: http://philmang.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/19
I think this is at the crux of the uphill battle we face as an agency. We (the great collective business America) are taught from university that it is the practical, the bottom line, that matters. And in a country, nay, a WORLD, in which people become literal billionaires overnight, the "level of acceptable risk" that you talk about has in my observation more accurately become the "everyday business of complacent rewards".
The willingness to put something radical out there are reserved for the brave few, and you know what...? It is those brave few who are more often than not lauded for the most innovative thinking, the most interesting creative work, and reap the greatest rewards (be they financial or consumer loyalty).
I think our inability to push "the big thought" to our clients is another difficult task. And I wish I could say it was that our clients simply reject anything outside the norm. However, I think we too, as an agency, have a fear of failure, despite one of our "Four Freedoms" being the freedom to fail. I think we are hesitant to rock the boat, though we're certainly capable of doing so, and it isn't just the "creative teams" that are responsible. Every department in an agency should bear the burden of innovation. I think we need to
take up that mantle and push ourselves further. Otherwise, we're just part of the noise.