| Marketing |
| Written by AdMix / Marjorie Teresa R. Perez / joyetteperez@yahoo.com |
| Monday, 05 October 2009 20:21 |
 Gustilo: “In the future, our success will hinge less on just getting people’s attention, and more on the collaborative process of inspiring people with great creative work.” Like the tale of the blind men and the elephant, different people see the role of marketing differently. Some feel that it revolves around things like good advertising, media exposure and influence. Others feel it revolves around creating word-of-mouth among customers. Still others feel that the higher purpose of these interactions are powerful brand building tools for creating marketing activities that engage these customers—if shaped, influenced and managed with purpose. Rather than simply creating advertising campaigns, Lowe Manila uses multiple channels that go beyond disseminating an organization’s brand message to make sure the organization is living this message in its interaction with its customers. These interactions are conceptual, sensory, experiential or virtual in nature. Lowe Manila shapes interactions through high-value ideas and context planning, as well as influences conceptual interactions through advertising that captures the imagination. “A good manager is transitioning [an organization] from doing traditional to expanding other channels, to include nontraditional. If you’ve been creative in one, you can also be creative in the other but you have to change the perspective. You might miss out reaching other people if you’re [just] focusing on one,” pointed out Ma. Elizabeth “Mariles” L. Gustilo, president and CEO of Lowe Inc., a member of Lowe Worldwide, in an interview. A seasoned advertising professional, Gustilo joined Lowe (then known as Lintas) in 1985. She handled many brands across product categories and has extensive experience in handling multinational accounts such as Unilever and Johnson & Johnson. She has led the agency in significant new business acquisitions of blue-chip local accounts such as Ayala Corp., PLDT, Ginebra San Miguel, Enervon, Red Ribbon and Alaska. Other brands the agency handle include Selecta, Johnson’s Baby, Rexona, Surf, Carefree, Go Nuts Donuts, FederaLand, One White Tea, Clear, Holcim, Cornetto, Tekki, BPI and Far Eastern University. Today, we see brand positioning becoming an increasingly collaborative process involving the brand’s consumers. In much the same way, learning to speak to your community means communicating at their level, and not just with a corporate communications press release. “The challenge is, how do you make it more responsive to the realities?” Gustilo asked. She added that “for some of our clients, the world does not revolve around Metro Manila. Business is in the provinces. So they invest in activation [in the provinces] and we have seen very clearly that when we use activation in the provinces, consumer response is immediate.” Lowe influences experiential interaction through consumer activation that leverages local and cultural nuances of the country’s emerging markets. “We manage these interactions through to completion via the scientific discipline of project management, using in-house capabilities and/or working with strategic partners,” Gustilo said. The agency likewise influences virtual interaction through digital media that deepens consumer involvement with the brand. Mounting activation became the agency’s strength. The key is to build value—faster, better and continued success. “We like to consider ourselves as a brand interaction agency because we figure the consumer interacts with the brand now in many spaces which was generally used by advertising. To pull these things together—above the line, activation, design and digital—obviously will come from a very solid idea. [You still need an idea] then you decide which avenues of communications are they most open to receive your idea. Then it becomes interesting,” she furthered. Marketing needs to change its thinking around this paradigm shift toward activation, and creativity will be at the center of this change. When Gustilo began her advertising career 27 years ago, she has seen more change in the last five years than in the 20 preceding it. The biggest item on her to-do list is not just to market to communities, but to evolve along with them. “No one is being led, but everyone is moving. You cannot just say, ‘do this’ anymore, but you can influence your peers. In the future, our success will hinge less on just getting people’s attention, and more on the collaborative process of inspiring people with great creative work.” At the same time, some parts of the future are very clear to Gustilo, just like the historical beginnings of the 15-percent ad agency commission, which has been the object of some attention in some parts of the world, largely due to attempts in innovating other schemes and arrangements for agency compensation.”[At a time] when our compensation schemes have changed, the traditional 15-percent commission no longer holds true. We have options to go into fee compensation schemes with clients, retainer’s or even paid man-hours. The client is now open to discuss different kinds of compensation schemes. Long before the creative and media split, the creative agency made money [out of the commission] of media. But if you’re no longer doing media, how will you then be compensated? So for the past 10 years, [people have been trying to find ways] how do you rightfully compensate a creative agency?” Beyond its value in defining compensation for an ad agency, the 15-percent commission, in this columnist’s view, also defines the nature of the ad agency’s relationship with client and media and suppliers as a professional partner in business rather than as a merchant or vendor of goods and services. This is why an ad agency’s revenue constitutes and comes from a share of these sectors’ volume of business or expenditure and not as a factor of “pricing.” In a sense, to generate income, an ad agency does not make a sale but rather earns a share. “[And now] that there are different channels of communication such as digital, activation, design that must be paid in a different form, not based on purely commission, since there’s no component of a media aspect. So there’s still a lot of challenge. The strategy has also changed because of the nature of the changes happening in the industry and the way clients view it. All the multichannel they can use to communicate on behalf of their brands, we noticed, a lot of pitches are now on a project basis,” she explained. This was the case where the agency’s efforts did not look like traditional marketing, although it was still a lot of hard work. But by shifting the focus from advertising response to engaging a community, they get a response that is far out of proportions to their efforts. “To be a 21st-century agency, you almost necessarily have to go digital and on activation. And as far as how it works in our profits, it presents alternative revenue streams for the agency,” Gustilo added. Lowe Manila is among the country’s top five agencies in the industry and top four international agency group. Reaching people with these ideas is not just about specific technique. It’s not even about social networks or viral. It is about continually finding new ways to connect with consumers, increasingly by offering them things of value that attract them. This means that the product-centric view of selling things is giving way to the centric view of providing information and building communities. This columnist believes there is no profession better suited to this kind of creativity than the one Lowe Manila is part of. Gustilo’s style has always been to push the frontier. “I’m like a helicopter. I don’t want to be removed from what the agency does. I like to know what we’re doing. My staff show me most of the agency’s work and try to keep my pulse [of what’s going on]. I talk to clients so I also hear what they have to say [about what we do].” What’s required is a better alignment of the people who are tasked and to act upon insights in order to make efficiency improvements and thereby drive better return on the client’s investment. |