July 6, 2010
Editorial
The creative equation
Originally published in NZ Marketing March-April 2010, page 2
At the inaugural Marketing Association forum in Auckland last year, Joanna Seddon of research conglomerate Millward Brown talked about how marketing and brand building could benefit overall business performance. “Marketing is about creativity in so many ways, but the fundamental role is to use creativity to grow profits,” she said. Hear hear, everyone replied.
Traditionally, however, the apparently mysterious realm of marketing has all too often been viewed with a degree of suspicion by the bean counters and boardroomers, no matter how often the potential financial benefits of effective strategies are extolled by proponents. It’s almost as if marketing is the crazy uncle with a great idea who can’t get anyone to listen to him. And as a result it’s usually seen as a cost, rather than a long-term investment, as events of the past few years attest. But Seddon says the ears of the doubting financial Thomases and Thomasinas have been pricking up recently, primarily because they see statistics that show, on average, 20–30 percent of a company’s value can be attributed to brand. James Hurman’s cover story (page 10) reinforces this notion. He crunched the stock numbers of the past ten Cannes Advertiser of the Year winners and found the perfect business storm—a period of creative marketing, creatively focused management and a concurrent stage of extraordinary financial success—is much more than a happy coincidence.
Good ideas are powerful, particularly in the echo chamber that is the digital age, and the tenacious pursuit of creativity has the ability to influence the bottom line, as shown by the evolution of Air New Zealand (page 14 and 20), which took out the Grand Prix at the RSVP and Nexus Awards. The ‘Nothing to Hide’ and ‘Bare Essentials of Safety’ campaigns gave the airline huge international exposure; the ‘Cranial Billboards’ were roundly lauded; and the ‘Grabaplane’ promotion went berserk. But it’s bigger than marketing and advertising. It’s creativity across the board and in the boardroom, and Rob Fyfe and his management team made an explicit—and relatively risky—decision to push the boat out. The success of Grabaseat, the new check-in facilities, the airline of the year award, Hangar 9 (the space used to design and test the new ‘cuddle class’ product before morphing into a marketing tool to wow the international media), the customer loyalty and, importantly, the numbers, have well and truly vindicated that decision.
There was no body paint involved with the Onecard mySpecials programme (page 22), but it certainly took a creative approach to targeted email communications and, with the help of some serious data management, greatly improved the customer experience. Seddon will be happy: it’s a prime example of creative, customer-focused marketing being used to grow sales and profits.
Two men who know a fair bit about creative marketing are Josh Lancaster and Jamie Hitchcock (page 14). They’ve earned a swag of shelf-wobblers for their creative work over the years. And the brave chaps have just started up their own ‘Kiwi as’ advertising agency. They found the time to give us a rundown of the trials, tribulations and triumphs of setting up a business in this rather changeable marcomms climate and the reasons behind the decision. Anyone who’s been in a similar position will empathise with that unique blend of anticipation, disorganisation, excitement, pride and stress. Anyway, enough waffling from me. I’m off to get married.