Corporate boards fail to understand the need to get back to basics and put brand purpose at the heart of marketing campaigns, according to Qantas marketing honcho Tim McColl Jones. Clients should own the brand instead of handing it over to third parties, he said.
Speaking at the IAA conference in Sydney this week, McColl Jones said a "terrific understanding of the brand" should be the starting point of all marketing. Continued fragmentation made it "pretty tempting to be lured away from that path ... because everyone's doing social, Facebook or something else, because it is new and topical without going back to that alignment piece. So I think getting back to basics is fundamental."
Understanding the purpose, "the driver of the business" and aligning activity to it was critical he said, "and I'm not sure there's enough understanding or debate around that topic around boardroom tables. I'm not sure there's enough understanding of the rigour around [defining] the business purpose and strategy and how you align it to marketing or any other form of activity."
That was not to suggest everything "should look and feel the same ... you have to have some elasticity. But unless there's an alignment and understanding to start with then it is never going to ladder up." A degree of flexibility was "crucial ensure the content we communicate is relevant to our many customers, the 23 million co-pilots."
While it didn't matter who produced content, the client, not the agency should "own and be the custodian of the brand," said McColl Jones.
"Too often in the marketing world I see that handed over to other parties and that causes confusion. People with different interests have their own take on the interpretation and that makes it difficult as a marketers because you're managing so many different points of view. Ultimately, the responsibility for the brand should sit with the business."
Speaking on the same panel Elizabeth Minogue, national Multiply integration director at MCN, Mike Branagh, director creative solutions at Nine's Powered unit, underlined the need for collaboration in answer to moderator and M&C Saatchi boss Jaimes Leggett's question around content production.
“It's about specialists in their field coming together to deliver a successful outcome. That is paramount to one of the current major industry problems. There are a lot of busted-arse business models out there. We're all trying to make a dollar and at the end of the day that is coming to the detriment of collaboration.”
Google industry leader/consumer, automotive & technology Bart Jenniches said that the “briefing process was broken” but that getting “back to the brand in some sort of pre-briefing” could help fix it.
“Collaboration needs to come much, much sooner. With collaboration financial concerns always exist. But it's in service of the customer, so there's got to be more.”
Clarification. This article has been updated to correctly attribute a quote to Mike Branagh. It had originally been attributed to MCN's Elizabeth Minogue.
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