The Comms Council has released Why Aren’t we Doing This? How long-term brand building drives profitability, a book written by UK strategist Peter Field, urging marketers and business leaders to understand how overly sales-led advertising is negatively impacting their business in terms of long-term growth and profitability.
“In recent times there’s been intense pressure on marketing outputs to constantly supply huge short-term results,” says the Comms Council blurb which accompanied M+AD’s review copy.
“An ever-increasing number of effectiveness case studies, which are drawn upon by Field in the book, show businesses following this path face both the issue of wasting money and find themselves in a downward spiral of constantly producing sales-led advertising that has no lasting impact on the business,” the blurb says.
“Additionally, Field argues against misguided theories that consumers are not worth marketing to if they aren’t ‘about to buy’ revealing that not spending money on brand, because we think consumers don’t care, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Field said: “The Comms Council commissioned this book because it saw a trend in the New Zealand advertising market toward short-term sales-led campaigns.
“This trend is something I’m seeing all over the world; it’s very one-sided and we know it doesn’t work. Companies who want to succeed should read the evidence and invest in brand building,” he says (in the Comms Council release).
“This trend is something I’m seeing all over the world; it’s very one-sided and we know it doesn’t work.”
“If we stick to investing behind brand for the long term, balancing this with short-term sales activation and employ the principles outlined in this book, we can expect to succeed.”
Field has spent 15 years as a strategic planner in advertising and 20 years as a marketing consultant; he works with blue chip clients worldwide and specialises in the analysis of effective case studies to drive brands and agencies to make better informed brand-plays.
The Comms Council commissioned the book to give New Zealand agencies and marketers the tools to prove the value of investing into brand.
Comms Council ceo Paul Head said: “Peter is a brilliant strategic mind, and at the Comms Council we urge everyone in our industry to read this book and use it to arm their business and to make better decisions.” says Paul Head, CEO of the Commercial Communications Council.
The book is available in *print and a downloadable PDF from the Comms Council, www.commscouncil.nz
*The Comms Council release (out of Spark PR & Activate) does not mention a price (we think the download, at least, is free). Attempts to verify this were thwarted at press time because the Comms Council phone line repeatedly delivers only a “You have reached us out of hours” message (11.30 today).
About the author
Peter Field spent 15 years as a strategic planner in advertising and has been a marketing consultant for the last 20 years. Effectiveness case study analysis underpins much of his work, which includes several important marketing and advertising texts: Marketing in the Era of Accountability, The Long & The Short of it, Brand Immortality, The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness, Selling Creativity Short and a chapter of the Sage Handbook of Advertising. His latest work in partnership with Les Binet – Media in Focus – was published in June 2017. He was a contributor to the Wharton Future of Advertising Project. He writes and speaks regularly around the world about marketing effectiveness. He is an honorary Fellow of the UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.
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