Pictures at an Exhibition

November 17, 2011 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

I’m a long time hobbyist photographer. While I occasionally get hired to take photos for commercial use (e.g. events, product shots, architecture), I mostly just do it for fun. In fact, I had never formally exhibited my photos prior to this past weekend when I participated in an art show on my street.

Now in its fourth year, this show is basically an art walk limited to the one block of the street on which I live. I was one of 10 artists exhibiting a variety of art in 5 houses, on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Reflecting on the event Sunday night I decided that it was a lot of fun, I’m really glad I exhibited and I’ll probably do it again next year. Since that simple statement doesn’t make for much of a newsletter on marketing measurement, I thought I would elaborate on how I came to that conclusion.

What I Spent

To begin with, my cost to participate was very low. Since the walls in my house were already covered with plenty of framed photos and ready to exhibit, I just needed to shuffle a few around and decide on prices. I probably spent all of about $50 to get ready, including salty snacks and chocolate chip cookies for my visitors. So, my costs were minimal.

What I Sold

I sold a total of 7 photos for $525. I’m happy with this outcome because:

  • Over the 2 days, I estimate 45 people dropped by my house. One person bought 2 photos, meaning I converted 45 prospects to 6 customers, for a conversion rate of 13.3%. This seems like a good rate for an art show, but I don’t have a benchmark to compare it to.
  • My sales surpassed my expectations. I thought I would do well to sell two or three photos and maybe pocket $200.
  • My customer acquisition cost ($50 ÷ 6 = $8.33 per customer) was much lower than my average revenue per customer ($525 ÷ 6 = $87.50 per customer) making each transaction and the overall event profitable.

What I Learned

For some background, our marketing efforts consisted primarily of:

  • Post card invitations hand-delivered to homes within roughly a 2 block radius
  • Each artist emailed invitations to their own list of contacts
  • The organizers solicited and obtained support from local politicians who emailed local residents and tweeted our event
  • Free on-line publicity, most of which came through a new local website called GrownUps55plus, for which I’m saying thanks by this mention

Secretly wearing my marketing measurement hat while disguised as an artist, I randomly asked those visitors I didn’t know the usual “how did you hear about us” kind of questions.  I learned that, in addition to those friends and neighbours I already knew, most people either:

  • Lived in the neighbourhood, or
  • Were friends of one of the other artists

From a product point of view, of the seven photos I sold, 4 featured trees as the main subject, 1 featured a tree and a window, 1 featured a window, and the other featured a racoon. Selling the racoon photo gave me a chuckle because earlier that day two other people had separately A) cursed the racoon, and B) saluted it with a middle finger. Clearly, one person’s art is another’s neighbourhood menace. Also, people like trees.

Another interesting fact is that the turnout was much higher last year when some houses estimated traffic at 300+ visitors. Perhaps that’s a sign people are less confident in the economy this year? Imagine if I could have applied my 13.3% conversion rate to 300 people instead of 45!

What I Would Do Differently Next Time

Based on my informal measurement efforts and observations, and input from the other artists, here are some thoughts for us to consider for next year:

  • Proximity and familiarity seem to bring people out, so we should expand our post card coverage beyond 2 blocks and each artist could invite more people.
  • Recruit more houses and artists to participate; the additional artists can invite their contacts, and a larger event with more art for sale should appeal to more people.
  • Continue to solicit free publicity and politician support.
  • Find a volunteer with public relations expertise, perhaps a student looking for experience, to help us get more local and on-line media coverage.

Conclusion

I didn’t apply measurement to our marketing efforts in any sort of disciplined way, yet maybe that’s appropriate for such a low budget event. Still, by simply looking at what I spent, what I sold, what I learned and what I would do differently next time, I should be able to improve my sales next year, and that’s what counts.

Whether for a small event like this, or a major marketing initiative, the best way to improve next time is to make sure you have a way of learning from what you did this time. Measure, review, reflect and capture what you’ve learned, so you can optimize future strategies.

There’s other soft data to consider, too. I had a great time, met some neighbours, saw some friends and enjoyed seeing people enjoying my photos.  I look forward to next year and in the meantime, I’ll be out shooting windows and trees, or maybe even a racoon.

 

Filed Under: Approach, Effectiveness Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, Measure, measurement

Marketing: Expense Or Investment

September 15, 2011 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

At the risk of stating the obvious, we live in challenging economic times. This week the focus is on the potential for Greece to default on its sovereign debt and what that might mean for the Euro zone, and beyond. Against a backdrop of high levels of consumer debt and unemployment, and low levels of consumer confidence and spending, it can be hard to be optimistic about the economy.

At times like these, companies quite naturally react with caution by controlling and reducing expenses. For example, they might reduce travel, cut staff or postpone capital expenditures. From my perspective, the really bad news comes when they cut marketing spending.

Marketing budgets can become a target for cutting at companies whose executives view marketing as a non-essential expense that could be cut without dire consequences, at least not in the short term. This view of marketing as expense rather than investment creates pressure on marketers to reduce spending during tough times.

Here’s the issue for marketers. If other executives view the money you control as an expense with no obvious measurable benefit, it’s a lot easier for them to want to cut that expense.

On the other hand, if they understand how marketing helps to acquire, develop and keep profitable customers, then they’ll be more inclined to see marketing as an investment that is essential to delivering great business results in the short, medium and long term. The path to that understanding is measurement.

Organizations that see marketing as an expense generally don’t understand how it creates value for the business, or don’t believe that marketing spending decisions are being made in a way that helps to optimize business value over time. Marketers who want to shift the Executive Team’s perspective to view marketing as an investment need to show that these “investments” are being evaluated using data that means something to the whole executive team.

How can you use measurement to help your executive team view marketing as an investment? Here’s a five point plan to begin that shift:

1. Commit to Measurement: Pick one standard approach to measurement that you can apply consistently to each and every marketing program. Applying one approach consistently is what enables you to compare each program to the others, so you will know which are most and least effective and be able to adjust marketing investment strategies accordingly.

2. Involve Key Individuals: To develop an approach to measurement that will be considered valid, involve those that determine how money gets allocated during budgeting, and where to cut when it’s time to cut. Typically, this can include the President and/or CEO, and the heads of Finance, Marketing, Sales, Operations, Technology, and Human Resources. With their involvement, you’ll be measuring the things that matter to the people that matter.

3. Determine What to Measure: This step is about making sure your marketing measurement process will measure the right things. You need to understand all the Key Performance Indicators that your key individuals monitor. These should be included in your measurement process, provided marketing can actually impact those KPIs. You also need to consider the organization’s objectives and the specific objectives of each individual program. You’ll be measuring results vs. these objectives.

4. Make Measurement Someone’s Responsibility: You can do it yourself, delegate it, put a team together or outsource it. Just make sure everyone is clear about who will do the measurement, when it’s supposed to happen, and how they’re going to get the data they’ll need.

5. Integrate Measurement: Ensure some of your marketing metrics become part of the organization’s KPIs that get reported and monitored regularly. Review and share your results which you can integrate into your planning process. This integration will help connect your marketing investments to business results.

Marketing budgets commonly come under pressure during tough economic times. Measurement can help you to defend those budgets but if you end up having to cut your budget, at least your measurement process will help identify where to cut.

Here’s an idea. While your competitors are diligently cutting their marketing, instead of cutting along with them, keep investing in your most effective types of programs (as identified through measurement) and you’ll steal market share from your thrifty competitors!

That incremental market share will help replace lost revenue should your market shrink and will really pay off in the longer term if you can maintain your share when the market grows in a stronger economy. That sounds like a good investment to me!


Filed Under: Approach Tagged With: Investment, Management, marketing, Measure

Sabermetrics & Moneyball

August 18, 2011 By Rick Shea Leave a Comment

While browsing the Sports section of the Toronto Star over breakfast one morning last week, I discovered a baseball statistic I had never heard of before.

Cathal Kelly’s article about the Toronto Blue Jays focused on General Manager Alex Anthopoulus’ fine work in transforming the Jays into a ballclub with great young players and a bright future. In Kelly’s analysis, he also pointed out that the Blue Jays “already have the best player in baseball”, José Bautista, who “leads all of baseball in wins above replacement rankings.”

I’ve followed baseball since I was a kid, but this was the first time I’d heard of “Wins Above Replacement”. Since José Bautista is considered one of the best players in baseball, I guessed it was some sort of composite score that rates a player’s overall performance. Still, I wondered “What the hell is Wins Above Replacement?”

In doing my research, I read up on Sabermetrics, an approach to statistical analysis in baseball that emerged in the 1990s. I read about Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, who is a leading proponent of using statistical analysis to aid in making decisions about which players to draft, trade or acquire. Billy’s work in this area led to a book being written about him called ‘Moneyball”. I also learned that many teams now employ statistical analysts and Sabermetrics experts.

Sure enough, Wins Above Replacement turns out to be a Sabermetrics statistic that estimates how many more wins a player would give his team as compared to a replacement player of below average quality. While there appear to be a number of formulae used by different Sabermetrics proponents, the principles they follow align nicely with my scorecard approach to measuring marketing programs.

Any Wins Above Replacement formula takes into account a number of batting and fielding performance metrics, weights those metrics appropriately, and tallies everything up to provide one overall score to assess a player’s contribution to team wins. Similarly, a marketing scorecard uses a combination of company, brand, customer and program performance metrics, weighted appropriately, resulting in one overall score to asses a program’s impact on the business.

They both:

  • Have a limited budget (for players or marketing programs).
  • Need to get the most for their money (spending efficiency and effectiveness).
  • Need to get better results than their competitors (win games, make money).
  • Need a way to organize and make sense out of lots of diverse data about the performance of their players/programs and team/company (so they can improve their player/marketing decisions).

This last point is the most important one. A general manager trying to assess the performance of different players on different teams, playing in different ball parks under different conditions, needs a way to organize and then convert all that data into one metric or score that enables rating and ranking players relative to their peers. Wins Above Replacement does that. It may be calculated in different ways by different teams, but so long as each team does its own calculations consistently between players and over time, their comparisons will be meaningful.

The same is true with measuring marketing programs. As a manager with a marketing budget, you need to evaluate the performance of different programs, with different objectives, for different brands competing under different conditions. A well designed marketing scorecard will give you a way to organize, evaluate and convert that diverse data into the single common metric you need to rate and rank each program relative to the others.

Pretend that you’re the Billy Beane of marketing and you need a decision support tool that helps you to organize and make sense of diverse data about a variety of marketing programs. With a scorecard based approach and your considerable wisdom, instincts and experience, you’ll gain the insights you need to improve your marketing effectiveness!

Filed Under: Approach, Effectiveness Tagged With: Effectiveness, Management, marketing, measurement, measuring, scorecard
Newer Posts »