Millward Brown exposes link between marketing investment, RoI to marketers

Limited knowledge on the link between marketing activities and return on investment (RoI) is largely responsible for the rush to cut marketing communication budget by companies during difficult times.

Profit-conscious CEOs have always put their marketing executives on the spot to establish the result of any marketing activity on RoI, and the inability to convince the boss has led sometimes to cancellation of campaigns.

Profit growth is a priority for managers and, according to experts, “yet little is known about how a firm’s marketing capabilities may be linked with its profit growth.”

This was the primary focus of Millward Brown’s strategy forum last week in Lagos, where the officials of the company from Middle East and Africa region engaged Nigerian business operators and marketers on the measurement and linkage between marketing campaigns, resource deployment and financial performance.

In an interaction with BusinessDay, Andrzej Suski, head of media solutions, Africa and Middle East for Millward Brown, said research industry was guilty in the past for just providing information on the beauty of advertisement.

He was confident that research industry, especially Millward Brown, “has made some efforts in its research and development,” as he went further down the line to give clients answers that showed exactly the link between marketing activities and RoI.

One of the areas of focus at the session ‘Bringing money back to clients’ pocket after huge investment in marketing communication,’ is the complexity of the media as it grows into various channels for marketing purposes. Africa is fast developing in media market, which is shaped by societal changing patterns, but more by technology. “Clients are faced with this increasing complexity and what we are doing is to help them navigate through that increasing difficult realities that they are facing in the media world as we give them some ideas and concepts on how to tackle those complexities to achieve marketing results,” Suski said.

Assessing advertising trends globally, Suski sees emerging trend of increased appetite from clients on how they could be more efficient and save money on whatever they do on media space.

Another emerging trend is the increasing appreciation of the fact that advertisers don’t need to advertise to make people see their advertisement, but change people’s minds about their brands or reinforce beliefs on what they think about the brands or change their behaviour. “There is really increased understanding on what advertisement does downstream and how it affects imagery, positioning and potential behaviour and habits,” he said.

According to Suski, in the last couple of years, development has been moving away from single media campaigns to more campaigns that advertisers could use, a mixture of those media at the same time and the idea being that each of the media being used has different strength and weakness. But Suski said “what we want to achieve is some sort that is bigger than the part and researchers therefore need to understand better how those multi-dimensional and multi-campaigns are working as a whole.”

In his view, Shiv Moulee, EMEA regional director, strategic advisory services for Millward Brown, said the global research and media organisation had developed extensive body of knowledge and insights to show how advertising travels across different markets with focus in Africa.

Moulee also said that “Millward Brown is ready to share with marketer what makes strong brands and the ability of brands to command premium and the characteristics associated with them.”

By: Daniel Obi