AdTech Breakfast Briefing – Tony Palmer, CMO, Kimberly-Clark
I attended AdTech’s breakfast seminar this morning which saw Tony Palmer (CMO, Kimberly-Clark) discussing the impacts of the GFC on consumer behaviour. A great quote from Tony was that marketers spend their entire careers attempting to change consumer behaviour then the GFC comes along and consumers are changing behaviour through their own free will! The most memorable quote was that marketers come up with a million fuzzy reasons for being but in the end they are here to:
Sell more shit to more people, for more money, more often. Classic.
Tony began by commenting on how the majority of individual marketers out there were keen to emphasize how important it is to maintain (or even increase) marketing spend during a recession but advertising figures in the US show at least a 25% drop since the previous year. Kimberley-Clark had maintained their spend and as such had managed to gain market share particularly in regions where their competitors had reduced spend.
The more interesting part of the talk focused on Tony’s belief that the traditional ways of developing a marketing campaign were now no longer effective. The new way of enticing customers to buy your widget over anyone else’s is as follows:
1. Develop your brand promise (traditional)
2. Determine the potential barriers that consumers may have to buying your product
3. Determine the sell proposition based on the promise and taking into account the consumers potential barriers.
4. Create campaigns to target each of the barriers.
A great example of this was a campaign for a KC nappy that focused on the consumers desire to provide the best for their child but having the barrier of being concerned about the cost of the premium brands. The campaign focused on the fact that for $1.50 you could keep your child in these nappies and this is about half the cost of a Starbuck’s coffee.
