Marketing with Smart:ROI

Tail wags dog

Reputation management

Fusing business model with brand strategy

Brand management in higher education

1 + 1 = 3

The best of both worlds

Engaging and embedding internal communications

Enhancing the brand through the IPO maze

Brand Architecture: considerations

Tail wags dog

Admittedly the world was a different place in the early eighties, but I still look back with some unease at what went on in advertising. No, not the numerous inter-departmental affairs, nor even the famously long lunches, but rather the tension - overt, or covert - that used to exist between the account/client managers and the ‘creatives’.

Both the agencies I worked for during that time – and they were two of the world’s biggest – prided themselves on their strategic marketing orientation.

In those days, account managers often were the planners and vice-versa (although we did have an in-house research department in support), and we account men (and women) had it drummed into us that great, truly effective advertising could only come out of an innate understanding of a brand’s make-up and how it could meet specific, identified and quantified consumer needs. A clear set of objectives and precise strategy, in other words. (This was the era, you must remember, of Rosser Reeves and the Unique Selling Proposition).