Your Attention Please!

Isn’t this truly what all sales and marketing leaders desire, your attention? Isn’t this why billions of dollars are spent annually to gain consumer attention for “my brand, my products, my content experiences?” Well actually, no. Creating, stimulating and achieving consumer attention is not a solitary art form. It is not in itself a lasting formula for fast market advantage.

What sellers and marketers reporting to the cold steel of the P&L really want are consumers' “attention, interest, conviction, desire and profitable close.” They want this union in hyper-speed congress with robust profits and immediate market gains. Further, sales and marketing teams united-in-purpose want their unfair share of such profitable attention to fulfill their forecasted revenue and profit commitments. To be clear, “sales and marketing are the variable means by which brands attempt to inform, persuade, remind and capitalize on new or previously relayed product assets, advertising dialogues and experiences to ensure short and long term profitable gains for their customers, for their stake holders.”

As we know, a brand is a promise. It is the core, the wide umbrella of product essence which must be polished, exposed and matured daily. We also know sales and marketing dialogues represent the voice and essence of the brand designed to establish and build valuable consumer relationships. And although multimodal marketing campaigns and other communication touch points sometimes intertwine and sometimes play different tactical roles, the goal of all communications is to contribute to brand equity, brand affinity and profitable returns.

Brand equity purposefully should create product awareness, should remind accelerate and monetize favorable, unique associations for the brand, for the products in consumer’s minds and consideration sets. Brand equity derived specifically from a marketing campaign should contribute to short and long term awareness designed to create, maintain, strengthen and preference product association. Formidable brand equity can encourage or discourage competitive product equity, potentially reshaping a direct competitor from the proven strength of their brand/product offense to the fallow weakness of brand defense. And yes of course there are a multitude of key ingredients that deliver brand equity cause-and-effect such as feature freshness, desirable cosmetics, usability advantages, pricing, brand experience, juxtaposed variables, packaging, etc.

One of the greatest temperature tests for your brand mettle to ensure your selling thread from “attention to close” accelerates opportunity can be derived through variable price promotions. The elasticity of brand-equity and price-value constructs are easily measured and proven through sales results. Just how much discount it takes to accelerate volume turns while remaining profitable is both a test of brand mettle as well as a test of forecast validity, P&L sanity. The goal of all marketers is to accelerate volume productivity to fuel volume profitability. The stronger your brand prowess and affinity the stronger your opportunity for profitability. After all, the goal is to earn a few more pennies for your brand value than your closest competitors while out muscling forecasted volumes for both your business and your direct competitors camps. After all, increases in product productivity deliver increases in brand profitability when sales and marketing run as one thread, when they unite push and pull as “won”.

Best of breed sales and marketing leaders outperform brand followers through pernickety digestion and dissection of meaningful product indicators focused sharply on:

  1. Average daily and weekly product uplifts or down drafts from marketing investments.

  2. Week over week average volume of sales to forecast inclusive to corresponding profit and competitive shelf share.

3. Monthly and year-over-year consumer retention rates tied to basket productivity, measured against aggregated and integrated CRM and SCRM attributes.

4. Daily, weekly, monthly and year-over-year change in operating profit margin.

5. Fast time to market-volume attainment with respect to inventory turns and profitable results for your brand as well as for your channel partners.

6. Predictive analytics and smart reactionary algorithms delivering significant and kinetically valued digital centric KPIs.

Best of breed sales and marketing leaders accelerate their products under their brand umbrella. Products are first and foremost any brands' hero, expected to offer higher sell through and profit attainment based on competitive advantage, based upon refulgent sales and marketing communications. Smart brand exposure based upon a core-down, heavy-up targeting program with respect to costs of engagement, profitable transactions, ensures successful consumer persuasion. “Attention” begins the masterful thread of effective communications to smartly garner consumer interest, desire, conviction and purchase. Most importantly, it is ensuring the hunt for consumer attention is at the dawn of market motivation, the first step towards faster results, market growth and assiduous profit engagements. Remember, pay attention to your attention, also known as your brand/product promise and measured results.