Marketing budget difference made irrelevant

How to make the marketing budget difference irrelevant

It is much easier to increase brand awareness with a high marketing budget, just as easy as it is “to sell” for free, or to report high EBITDA by eliminating all costs and none of the revenues. Unfortunately none of these situations are real options in real life.

Most marketing directors plead lack of resources when comparing their budget with the biggest competitor’s. This difference can be neutralized by choosing wisely the efficient channel and method of promotion.

The biggest chunk of the advertising budget usually goes towards ATL: TV, out-of home, radio, print. The general perception is that it has a higher reach, that TV creates brands and facilitates the first encounter between the customer and the product.

In order to make sure that ATL investment is efficient it is important to map the brand awareness versus spending relative to competition.

In case of ATL we generally come acroos one of the 6 situations below:

In any market there is only one company which can be said to have the largest marketing budget and chances are it’s not yours. This means you are faced with aggressive competition with superior marketing budget.

If this is the case, it all comes down to three choices: 1) you give up increasing brand awareness; 2) you miraculously manage to come by a huge ATL budget; 3) you communicate efficiently by choosing your battles wisely.

If you chose the 3rd option you must have understood that using most of your budget on ATL will only emphasize the image of “mouse” vs. “elephant”. It’s time to get creative!

Reliance on BTL rather than ATL has become a success practice for two main reasons:
- Emotional impact can be much higher than ATL and hence the connection with the brand lasts longer.
- An effective BTL campaign can lead to “word-to-mouth” effect. Thanks to social media BTL reach can be compared to ATL.

My favourite BTL examples with high emotional impact and high reach are:

The idea in brief: Heineken, being the main sponsor of Champions League, set up a fake event in Milano, combining classical music and poetry. This event was on the same date and at the same time as the big match: Real Madrid – AC Milan. They worked with a number of accomplices, who were the wives, bosses, or teachers of the “subjects”, great AC Milan supporters. The accomplices managed to get the subjects to the fake event under false pretences, against their will of course. Few minutes into the concert, the music stopped, making way for the big match and thus exceeding by far the subjects’ expectations.

What Heineken did was create a huge disappointment by choosing the most different event from the football match, thus reminding people how much they wanted to see the match, and in the end succeeding in associating the Heineken brand with an extraordinary and memorable experience.

It is an expensive strategy, which combines ATL – to make sure it has the reach – and BTL – for the emotional impact, but the result is truly extraordinary. At the end of the clip you can see a few stats as well.

The idea in brief: A number of alleged prostitutes start a dance number in the window of a brothel in Red Light District of Amsterdam. Passersby stop and start enjoying the show and cheering. When everybody starts to feel good, the message comes. Quite shocking.

The spectators‘ changed facial expression says it all regarding the emotional impact.

“We placed a big red push button on a quiet Flemish square where nothing really happens”. Once pushed it unleashes rapid sequences of short plays, which unfold in front of the viewers “life like in the movies”.

An expensive BTL campaign considering the props and actors, but the reach is enormous: 44 mil viewers on YouTube. How much would that cost in ATL?!

A Coca-Cola vending machine in a university cafeteria is transformed into a “happiness machine delivering doses of happiness”. The name of this campaign (“happiness machine”) says it all: bring joy to customers. The vending machine starts giving away Coke products and ends up serving flowers, pizza and a huge sandwich which, besides increasing the impact, assures customers that it’s not just a technical problem. The campaign was repeated in different places and in different ways, there were “happiness trucks” as well, and many clients that heard about it in social media started trying different Coke vending machines just in the hope of getting the same experience.

Probably the cheapest one of 4 examples, with high impact, high reach, a true success.

All these examples have one thing in common: the company never tried to sell anything, they looked only at customer’s experience.

There is a big difference between this type of BTL and your frequent “promoter distributing flyers in a crowded place”. Even if you dress the promoters in “cute” animal costumes, even if you use attractive young ladies, in 5 seconds the subject will realize you are just trying to sell them something and in 30 seconds, they will forget all about it at best or, will distinctly remember being disturbed, at worst.

Another way to reach clients efficiently can be association with other brands, in a nutshell: sponsorship which targets the customers we have in common with the respective brand.

Here as well the tendency is to imitate our biggest competitor even though we might not be able to match their spending.

Let’s take a short example:

Let us say that our biggest competitor sponsors a big football club, Real Madrid, because football is the favourite sport of 25 – 40 ys old men. We decide we need to keep up, so we decide to seal a similar deal with a football club. Unfortunately, not having the same budget, we will end up sponsoring Osasuna or Granda, which again will only accentuate the “mouse vs. elephant” image.

What can we do in this case?

The right strategy is to see where and when else we can find the targeted segment, in other words ask ourselves “what do men do between match days?”

We might discover that they are waiting for their wives in shoe shops, so the much cheaper option would be to sponsor one these retail chains. Using a creative message might also bring a much higher impact and even a high reach through “word-of-mouth”.

The size of the budget matters, as it can make your life easy or hard, but no matter your circumstances, the key to creating brand awareness and emotional attachment in a noisy environment is creativity rather than money.