Is marketing an investment or an expenditure?
11 July 2013, 18:04 PM
UPDATED
12 July 2013, 00:08 AM
When you approach your head of the marketing department with a brilliant Oh-So-WoW marketing campaign for your product, the first thing you might notice is your boss doesn't seem so excited about it. Don't blame your boss, because there are always several dilemmas that CXOs and heads of marketing department face before taking any kind of marketing decisions. The biggest of them is always the one prime question, 'Will this marketing be an investment or an expenditure?'
Prabir Sarker, CEO of Kaspersky Bangladesh, thinks that the myth is over long ago. Marketing is always an investment which is now, not an option, rather an integral part of the success behind any kinds of product. The doubt about marketing being an expense lies in the traditional thinking of comparing sales with marketing. Most of them are also driven by the idea of immediate sales rather than establishing their brand for a longer term.
According to Gousul Alam Shaon, managing director of Grey Bangladesh, this kind of short term, immediate sales-driven strategy can be attributed as 'Bottom line driven Myopia' where the managers miss the bigger picture of their products. According to him, this kind of vision leads companies to choose a rather cliché strategy, where they always position their products on how low their price can be.
Based on his personal experience, Munirul Kabir, country representative Bangladesh, Google, believes marketing is an investment, proven with overwhelming evidence year after year. But then comes the important question, how to do proper marketing? What to choose? ATL? BTL? Or TTL? What should be the best strategy for an IT based product?
Shameem Ahsan, senior vice president, BASIS, thinks marketing is like telling a story. Instead of being a narrative story, rather he believes 'Some times less means more'. Based on selective retention theory, the communication message should not be elaborative, rather it should be more precise and specific. You can even start with a logo. There should be a vision which should be the invisible guiding principle behind the marketing strategies. Vision should not be product specific, rather it is about a larger benefit/scheme your product is offering.
Kamal S. Quadir, CEO of Bkash says, for an IT product, it is very important to have a glocal (globally local) vision. Based on the huge interest from foreign investors such as Paypal, Huffington Post etc, IT products have a huge potential market which can be capitalised using the human resource that Bangladesh have.
Sudir Nair, senior vice President and head of digital, South Asia, Grey Digital, believes apart from ATL, BTL and TTL strategy, social media strategy should not be different from the marketing strategy. Social media is also a kind of marketing, people are marketing themselves through word of mouth every day. It is a new trend of marketing you own product through social media.
Success of any kind of marketing strategy actually depends the combination of sales and marketing rather than specifying each of them separately. Sales is more labour intensive whereas Marketing is more talent and idea intensive. So, a structured alignment between these two is the ultimate stairway towards success.
Worried about how to manage finance for you marketing budget?
Shaon believes, when there is a vision, when you know what you are going to do, budget is not a hurdle you should be worried about. If a vision is powerful, it can be achieved, through discussion and collaboration between parties by developing a proper revenue generation model.
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