| The glorious increase in clients' budgets will not mask the deeper issues that face marketers and advertising agencies. By Simon Lloyd.
Marketing
The issue of how marketing can prove itself as central to company earnings has been the main priority for senior marketers in 2004. It will be again next year. In August, The Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) published a long-awaited discussion paper about the development of a uniform set of marketing metrics for companies, with the objective of providing marketers and non-marketers, particularly company board members, with a set of standard measures by which the value and effectiveness of marketing could be demonstrated.
AMI's president, Roger James, says: "We will be pushing ahead with the development of a marketing metrics tool kit, the major task for 2005.
The founder of the Chief Marketing Officers Forum, Dianne Davis, agrees with James that metrics will remain critically important for the marketing industry in 2005, but she says marketers should not allow the issue to sideline them from another key question they face next year: how to nurture brands not just externally, through their relationship with consumers, but internally. Davis says internal branding - communicating and upholding the values ad culture of a brand to company employees and shareholders - is only in its infancy in Australia. She says that in 2005 many companies, particularly in the services sector, will be paying much closer attention to the role of internal branding as a factor in overall brand health.
Davis says: "Internal branding is a key strategic issue that is still at an immature stage of evolution, but I am convinced we will see a real thrust in this area next year. Marketers will need much closer involvement with the human resources function to drive that.
For service companies particularly, their people, how they are groomed and looked after, and how they communicate brand values and deliver on the brand's promise is becoming the one way that can differentiate their brand in an era when differentiation is more and more difficult."
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