206. Guest tools

Link to Mud Valley™ brand marketing community membership page and special offers

This article was originally written for All About Branding, the very popular Internet site devoted to brand development, book reviews and learning.

Our world as brand marketers is changing, and what is changing it is the ever more widespread use of increasingly automated marketing metrics. E-marketing, in the way that it has been designed, is intrinsically measurable to a level that has never existed before, from the initial prospect of your product / service to repeat and loyal purchase, and it is easy, cheap and virtually real-time. Which means that the job of brand marketing is becoming ever more formal and scientific, which means, in turn, that everyone should consider using some marketing tools to help them along their way, even outside the e-marketing environment.

In the Mud Valley™ Strategy & Brand Marketing Community, we have always believed that tools are a good thing for at least three reasons:

1. they capture the best process knowledge to date, at least if they are continuously improved, and put that knowledge to practical use

2. they are a shared format for discussion. The negotiation remains more rational. We can explore conversion rates, then budgets, not budgets then reduced budgets
3. they give us accurate assessments. Back-of-the-cigarette-packet calculations can be perfectly adequate, but they are just as often exactly wrong. Run a quick product profitability analysis, then an ABC activity-based costing analysis, and experience your world turning upside down

Which is why, over the last several years, Mud Valley has focused on developing a wide range of strategy and brand marketing tools to help people analyse their current performance and to plan accurately and reliably for the future. These tools are best used in conjunction with objective data, but even filling them with best guesstimates is a start, inevitably raising thorny questions, and pointing you towards where accurate answers are most needed.

So what sorts of tools have we been developing?

Brand equity/proposition tracking is a hot topic at the moment. Our tools help you analyse and track your brand, using an Internet-friendly 5-7 minute e-survey, cheaply enough for you to repeat it on a regular basis (the essence of tracking, after all).

Scorecards are another monitoring mechanism, placing the brand within a business context (a critical process if you want more budget for your brand), so we have brand, business and financial scorecards.

Saying the most relevant things about your brand freshly and consistently is at the heart of effective brand communications, so we have developed tools to ensure that you understand the customer’s decision making process, and to help you ensure that you are articulating the essence of your brand as key messages consistently across all media.

"Bullet-proofing" your strategic brand plan helps fix it as a workable plan with wholehearted implementer buy-in, so there are tools and techniques to identify where things are most likely to go wrong so as to ensure that they don't.

To get a more detailed sense of the types of strategy and brand marketing tools available, click here.

Not that we are the only toolshop in this global town. So that you don’t all leap at us at once and swamp us with demand, here are some other sources of tools you may wish to consider:

• Bplans publishes (unsurprisingly) business planning software. Within the tools section, they also have some excellent free financial tools analysing cash flow, breakeven rates, conversion rates, and so on. If your focus is specifically on marketing planning, then the sister product Mplans should do it
• Building Brands has a series of online brand games you can play, the Brand Management Game, the “Brand World” Quiz, and Hangman. It also sells the AdCracker resource CD for advertising and brand development
• Creative Research Systems provides a free sample size and statistical confidence calculator online. This is good if you want to get a fix on how reliable your survey results are likely to be as a one-off, but for tracking purposes you need a two-sample calculator (which, by strange coincidence, we happen to have)
• Envisional offers a web-crawler technology that trawls the Internet day and night, searching for use and abuse of your graphic and verbal trademarks. The same technology can be used to conduct intuitive market research to discover what people are saying about you and your competitors
• e-surveys: there is more e-survey technology around than there are grains of sand on a beach, or planets in the universe. At the cheap end, the most famous one is Survey Monkey, costing $US 20 for a maximum of 1,000 interviews a month (or for free if you ask less than 10 questions). At the professional end you have Confirm-it (as used by many of the top market research agencies, and eDialogues, which is more of a graphic communications platform and business compliance tool, with a strong market research component
• Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers is a portal which specialises in pointing you towards cheap and free e-marketing tools. He publishes an excellent regular newsletter in which he describes the latest tools he has found in categories like Brand Advertising, Blogs, Conversion Rate Marketing and Viral Marketing. Membership is free (and he has such a nice smile, too)
• MarketingNPV, as the name suggests, specialises in developing ROI return on marketing investment tools. Many, if not most, of their tools are free, and include Sales Headcount Re-Allocation, Forecasting with Markov Chains, and Finding Drivers without Data. In fact, they seem to have a bit of a thing about analysis tools that counter-intuitively do not require data – that should certainly speed things up
• MindBranch is an online resource which tells you which published market research reports are available to you, and offers them for sale
• nvigorate have developed some very smart integrated software where you log your campaigns and their results, and share them with the rest of your organisation, who also share their campaigns and their results with you. With a bit of luck and discipline, you get more effective campaigns to market faster every time. T4M’s BrandMaster appears to do much the same thing, while Unica’s Affinium goes one step further and integrates relationship and Internet marketing processes as well
• Sequent Learning provides product management and marketing templates, including Product Management Life Cycle Model, Product Strategy Outline, and Strategic Marketing Planning Model
• Shoulders of Giants offers you a whole series of business and marketing training packages on DVD, including the Pepsico Walkers crisp case study, a Masterclass in Brand Communications, and How to Create Topline Growth
• UK Business Link has an online expert tool designed to answer the question Which Advertising Media are Right for My Business? It also has an extensive free database of business advice, including a section on sales & marketing

So, there you have it. If you have a horror of painstakingly detailed analysis and its related technology, we regret that the water may be warming up for you. Don’t be a frog, take the leap. Although it will cost you a horrible amount of time, it won’t cost you a lot of money. If you are cash rich and time poor, there is of course another solution – you sub-contract the whole shebang. Same difference.

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