Out of the Box

Spring Cleaning

By Menachem Lubinsky on March 16 2007

A corporate memo to the marketing team of a large corporation in early April had the words “Spring Cleaning” next to the “Subject.” It went on to detail a series of steps that the marketing team was taking to retool its marketing program.

Spring-cleaning to some people means discarding a lot of unnecessary items in addition to putting away the winter clothes. To others, it means reorganizing the house without much discarding. Clothes are put neatly back on shelves and drawers they came from and other items are packed away in boxes.

I am not aware of a formal spring cleaning for marketers but the principle of reorganizing the marketing elements of a business seem sound. In the memo, the Vice President for Marketing raises several key questions for his marketing team: (a) Are all our marketing initiatives meeting their goals, (b) Have some of our ads outlived their shelf lives, and (c) Did we retire some marketing activities prematurely?

The questions raised by the VP do indeed coincide with the kind of questions you might ask during a spring-cleaning: (a) Do I really need everything in this closet? (b) Are some of these items no longer current? (c) Is there something in the attic I could use?

The difference between the house spring-cleaning and the marketing spring-cleaning is that in marketing it does not necessarily have to take place in the spring. The question of whether a marketing program is meeting its goals is a question that need not wait for the spring-cleaning. It is something that should be subject to an ongoing evaluation.

A book publisher challenged his marketing people to extend the shelf life of some of the books he published. He felt that after initial successes and in one case making the bestseller list, the book sales waned and sometimes just faded away. While this may be common for many publishers, this publisher’s marketing team came up with a creative program to prolong the life of the books. They created a club for people who automatically got the books at a heavily discounted prices after six months, they developed a program for bookstores that sold used books, and they ran ads in various senior citizens and college publications.

After two years, the publisher learned that the program was not universally successful for all the books they published. Some of the titles did not do well in either the used bookstores or the ads. The goals that had been set for all books were only partially successful. The publisher knew that he may have waited too long to assess the program. After tweaking the program that now segmentized possible readers by the subjects of the book, the program was much more successful.

Advertisers constantly worry about the shelf life of their ads. In many cases, familiarity is part of the branding but in other cases the ads may have outlived their usefulness. It is important to set some sort of evaluative frame around the program. If the measure is immediate sales, then it should be fairly simple to monitor. If it is to continue to brand a product or idea, then the measure might be eventual market share, but that too must be measured within a given time frame.

In advertising, even if an ad seems to be doing its job, there is always the nagging question of whether a fresh look and new and creative idea could propel the product to the next level of success. That is when good research and a great creative idea come into play.

Here’s where spring-cleaning can come back into the picture. If the new ad idea is ultimately successful, the former ad will be forgotten. But if for some reason the new ad did not do quite as well as the one that was presumed to have overextended its shelf life, there may be a reason to dust off the old ad and bring it back to life, albeit with a bit of a more contemporary look. Remember the question of the VP, “Did we retire some marketing activities prematurely?” In this case, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

The problem with some businesses is that they seem to never go through the spring-cleaning exercise. They sometimes seem to coast along without ever stopping the clock to do a reality check. Even more problematic is when a company does not seem to know what marketing programs it has in place. I have found that to be true in two instances recently. One had purchased the business a year and a half ago and never changed any of the marketing programs from the previous owner. The second was a 60-year old company that had not changed anything in more than a decade. Its logo, ads, and brochures were all done in the early ‘90’s.

So irrespective of how you feel about spring-cleaning in marketing, you should at least ask the questions that our VP did. A house without any spring cleaning can most certainly be overwhelmed and miss out on the opportunity to bring in new and exciting items.

Out of the Box is a collection of strategic marketing articles that Lubicom has published on various topics, trends and ideas in the marketing world. The articles have been published in the Hamodia weekly newspaper circulated on three continents to a readership of well over 100,000.

The name, "Out of the Box" is a term used frequently in business nowadays to describe creative thinking that is not the norm. It is meant to help a business pull away from the pack or separate oneself from the competition. It is to some extent fraught with risk, simply because it is not the run of the mill thinking, but it is at the same time the key to reaching the next opportunity.