Are Mark Ritson’s 10 principles of advertising effectiveness relevant to SME and scale-up brands?

Are Mark Ritson’s 10 principles of advertising effectiveness relevant to SME and scale-up brands?

‘We’re entering a golden age of advertising effectiveness which has been completely revolutionised over the last 15 years’ 

That is the view of marketing thought leader Mark Ritson who was speaking at Marketing Week 's recent Festival of Marketing – a view that was further underlined with his comprehensive 10 step guide to effectiveness.

The guide outlines a set of fundamental principles encompassing creative, budgeting, media and evaluation that few in marketing would disagree with - as Ritson himself admits ‘It’s hardly breaking news that great creative is essential for great advertising’

But there’s no doubt its written from the perspective of established brands with sizeable budgets, as the examples used in his guide testify; Cartier , KitKat Chocolatory and Häagen-Dazs Shops .

From our perspective - working with scale-ups and SMEs looking for rapid market expansion - there are some significant differences in how we approach effectiveness compared to the approach Mark Ritson recommends in his principles.  These differences are as a result of the growth stage that the brands we work with are in – typically earlier stages of development than the Cartier’s of the marketing world.

Indeed one of the common challenges faced by scale-up marketers is breaking out of the ‘performance plateau’ - the slowing down of sales growth as easier-to-convert customers have been exhausted (see accompanying graph for an illustration of the concept).

So what are the key considerations for greater effectiveness for scale-ups looking to kick on to their next phase of growth?

1)    Expanding your targeting - For scale-ups there comes a stage where targeting has to move beyond those most likely to convert in the short term to potential buyers in the longer term, if the brand is to grow. 

That means expanding reach to include all category buyers, and especially non-users and very light users of your brand.  While the size of this group inevitably varies by category and brand, LinkedIn use a 95-5 rule, which states that as a general rule 95% of your potential buyers aren’t ready to buy today.

2)    Test, test, test - Taking the first steps in brand building and expanding reach to potential buyers typically means the introduction of new channels. 

For scale-ups with limited historical data that places an even greater importance on structured experimentation than for more established brands. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) may not be feasible given data limitations; and in any case will not provide evidence for the effectiveness of completely new channels.

Structured testing means setting up a series of experiments with clear success metrics related to their objectives. So for brand building activity that could be traditional upper funnel metrics such as awareness or consideration, or more dynamic and accessible indicators such as share-of-search.

Measuring the incrementality of new channels on sales performance through well-designed geo-experiments is a great way to give confidence to scale-ups before wider roll-out and investment.

3)    Continuous learning - Perhaps the most important principle for scale-ups to adhere to when looking to grow is one that should be familiar to early/mid stage businesses - a culture of learning. 

The concept of a learning culture centred around a process of performance modelling, experimentation, simulation and implementation (MESI) has recently been outlined in an excellent IPA publication ‘Making Effectiveness Work’ . While it applies to all organisations, it is particularly relevant to scale-ups who have limited past performance to fall back on and are on a much steeper learning curve.

This makes it all the more important for SME’s and scale-ups that the organisation is committed to a structured, hypothesis-driven testing roadmap, nimble experiments, and rapid roll out and scaling of what works.

So in summary…  Mark Ritson is right in that the industry has come a long way in understanding the fundamentals of marketing effectiveness. 

But those fundamentals do need to be adapted to reflect the particular circumstances of scale-up businesses on the next phase of their growth journey - something we have a lot of experience in at Propel Digital , and are constantly refining as we learn more through our own structured experiments and deeply-ingrained analytical culture.

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