Marci shared a thought-provoking presentation by Mark Lester on the advertising world’s love for driving “awareness”. Here’s the presentation (see my thoughts below):
To me, the biggest take away from this has to be that a brand can’t take some magic pill and suddenly have an architecture for their marketing communications.
Awareness is important, but that depends on the product and the market. “One size fits all” is the real fallacy.
If you’re an awareness-driven marketer and this presentation shocks you, take a minute to step back and think about the common sense path a consumer takes from ignorant of your product’s existence all the way to purchase. Maybe even ask a few of your real customers.
The point isn’t that awareness is evil, that everything you know is wrong, and you need to go pick up a book written by a new media guru.
No, the point is that you need a coherent strategy for your marketing communications that sees every tactic matched against a goal that ladders up to the real measure of success: purchase.
Your goal as a marketer is business profitability, just like everyone else in the organization.