Marketing Intel | A Marketing Audit is a Vital Tool

This self-assessment exercise identifies gaps in your promotion and advertising strategy providing your company with a competitive edge

Sep 1, 2010  

by Steve Williams

In the past 18 months the business world has been turned upside down. The markets have done gyrations worthy of an Olympic gymnast. And depending on who you believe, the recovery is either well under way, imminent or nowhere in sight.

No matter which of those three camps you’re in, now’s the time for a marketing audit. The term may seem like an oxymoron if you adhere to John Wanamaker’s classic aphorism, “I know half my advertising budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” Do a quick survey of your industry peers. You’ll find that for most companies financial audits are indispensable, audits of operations and processes are advisable, and marketing audits are unheard of. Yet to help your company get a jump on its competitors, a marketing audit can be the most valuable tool of all.

Remember, marketing isn’t just advertising. It’s anything that your target audiences might look at when evaluating your company.

Who should be on your marketing audit committee? If your company is large enough (and astute enough) to have a chief marketing officer, that’s where you start. Ditto the vice-president of marketing. Sales manager, check. Distribution manager, you betcha.

To round the committee out, find a couple of junior employees with fire in their bellies. They’ll bring a fresh, “why not” perspective to the table.

The first thing to audit are your target audiences. Have they changed? If you’re still segmenting by demographics alone, it’s time to drag your company into the new millennium. We live in an era of 60-year-old snowboarders and 20-somethings who are ditching “office casual” in favour of Mad-Men-inspired suits. Mommy-bloggers are a force of nature. The fastest-growing user group on Facebook is the over-50s.

Old paradigms aren’t dying hard; they’re hopping off a cliff like lemmings.

Examine whether you have the proper channels for customer feedback. Focus groups stopped being the be-all and end-all years ago. For example, Procter & Gamble often queries people about their laundry habits. Years ago focus groups were telling them the status quo was fine. But when they went into people’s homes to observe, they saw them opening detergent boxes with screwdrivers and stirring the soap into the wash water with sticks. That’s why there’s an easy-open plastic strip on the Tide box and quicker-dissolving formulas.

If you’re running a small company, you may not have a formal research budget. But you can still gather your front line people together and ask them, “what should we do differently, based on your experience?”

Soliciting feedback is good. You also have to be ready for the unsolicited variety. It doesn’t take an earth-shaking event to cause a consumer-led tsunami. Earlier this year in Michigan, a student created a Facebook group against a towing company. The group had 800 members within two days of its creation. One month after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill the satirical Twitter feed BPGlobalPR had more than 10 times the followers of the official feed, BPAmerica.

The last thing your CEO needs is to wake up one morning and find there’s an online group dedicated to gripes about her company and it’s thriving like a B.C. grow-op.
Once you have a firm grasp of who your customers are and what their perceptions about you are, consider everything that has an impact on your target audience’s consumption of your product or service. Pricing. Distribution. Packaging. Your internal culture. The consumer experience. Advertising.

For an example of a small company that is doing it right, look at Kogi Barbecue, the Los Angeles-based fleet of lunch trucks that has done away with the traditional restaurant model. At first, their marketing consisted of driving their truck to nightclubs and giving the bouncers and doormen free samples. That created impressive word of mouth. Now they drive around blogging and tweeting their locations. The truck schedule is also posted in advance on their website. Sure, it’s great food. It’s also a good indication of what you can do when you throw conventional thinking out the window of a moving vehicle.

Huge companies are capable of adapting too, like Hyundai. The last two years have been the most dramatic in the auto industry since Henry Ford began nudging horses onto the shoulders of the road but instead of losing their heads, Hyundai is using them. The only thing more profound than the redesign of their cars is the ingenuity of their marketing programs.

Someone in Hyundai’s C-suite was able to put himself in the shoes of an average pavement-pounder. He didn’t ask “what do I want from a car?”; he asked “what do I want from a car company?” The answer to the first question leads you to features like more cup holders. The answer to the second question creates savvy marketing like Hyundai’s job-loss protection program. If you bought or leased one of their cars and lost your job in the subsequent 12 months, they’d take it back. Not so long ago Apple thought of itself as a computer company. So did IBM. You have to evolve, and a marketing audit can help kickstart the process. Alberta is famous for dinosaurs. You don’t want your company to be one of them.

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