8 January 2008
Viewpoint - Andy Wheatley, Director of Strategy, Tangent Direct
No-one can deny the importance of relevancy and personalisation in communications, using data to segment customers appropriately according to behaviour, channel preference, demographics etc. However, little is said about the importance of geography, which is as much of an influencer on purchasing habits as other demographics. Some 80% of purchasing decisions are made locally and yet most brands spend just 20% of their budgets on local initiatives. Major brands should be looking at how to create campaigns that are nationally on-brand but locally relevant – yet very few are.
One of the key reasons for this is that local marketing doesn’t fit the traditional model for building brands from the top down with a strong national message. It’s about building brands up from the bottom with a strong local message. Yet the thought of allowing local managers to run short term tactical campaigns which could deconstruct national brand messages is, unsurprisingly, untenable for brand managers. And running 100 individual marketing strategies for a company’s 100 retail branches is unsustainable. So is local marketing a white elephant like one-to-one marketing? A great idea, but too impractical and costly to be worth the effort?
Technology has made local marketing an exciting reality, enabling marketers to create locally relevant marketing campaigns that often significantly outperform national initiatives. By combining technology with consumer data and national marketing strategy, you can allow local managers to use their superior knowledge of local market conditions to produce relevant, engaging campaigns. These can be executed across multiple channels (on and offline) quickly and efficiently. To the relief of brand managers, the amount of autonomy local managers have with campaigns can be controlled by head office, with bespoke templates set up that ensure all communications are brand-compliant.
However, you need to ensure that you use the ‘right’ technology for the job. There are a number of local marketing solutions that have been built by clever technologists, but which fail to fulfil marketers’ needs.
Brands which persist in over-protecting their brands with uniformity will not be able to keep up with the increasing consumer demand for relevance. They need to remember that their brands may be national, but their customers are local.
Last Updated on 08/06/2010