Between advertising and promo, which do we need more?

Q: We sell ready-to-wear men’s shirts and pants. Every time we needed to raise sales, we resorted to sales promo and never to advertising except once when sales actually fell when we advertised. So we decided to cut support for advertising and were then surprised to see sales going up! Since then, we decided that advertising is useless and took it out of our annual budget.

In our last-quarter review of our annual corstrat plan, our marketing director spoke in favor of advertising and proposed giving back its budget item. He said he attended your “Accountable Advertising Strategy” seminar. He said that you told your seminar attendees that after a certain scale, a company cannot do without advertising. He told us that you cited the cases of Unilever, P&G, Jollibee, McDonald’s and other big consumer companies where it was advertising that helped maintain sales growth. In the category where we belong, he told us that you singled out Bench and Penshoppe as cases in point.

We had a heated debate and discussion. I’m the company CEO and am a finance type. I told everyone that the issue is simple: “Between advertising and promo, which do we need more?” The evidence and our past experience favor promo. But the debate continues. Our marketing director recommended our seeking your opinion and Marketing Rx. I decided I’d write you and will appreciate your help.

A: Often, a debate escapes resolution because of the way we frame the issue. Your framing was as an “either or” issue: “Either it’s promo that we need more or it’s advertising.” In most marketing situations, the more realistic and practical framing is as a “both this and that” issue: “Both promo and advertising together are needed” to have more than just good or even the very best results.

Let’s see if this is true in your case. You mentioned having once advertised and saw sales going down instead of rising. Then, when you eliminated advertising, you witnessed sales going up instead of falling.

But it’s a “non-sequitur” to immediately jump to the conclusion that these two observations proved how useless advertising is. You need to take a more serious look at the data plus consider the surrounding circumstances of each observation, and then understand how advertising works under those circumstances. When you do these, it will almost always reveal the actual process underlying the advertise-then-sales-dropped connection and the did-not-advertise-then-sales-rose link. In other words, how do you know that in the first observation, sales would have fallen even more if you had not advertised? And in the second observation, how do you know that sales would have risen even more if only you had maintained advertising?

But you can know. Or at least you can have the basis for knowing if only you understand how advertising and promo can work with synergy when given mutually reinforcing purposes.

Consider McDonald’s case. McDonald’s is now just like you. Its priority has been for consumer promotion. But it has not given up on its advertising. It’s still into “A&P” and unlike you, it’s not into an “A or P” choice.

The reason is purpose-driven. That’s how it was with its “2011 McDonald’s Kiddie Crew Workshop.” This was a major summer promo campaign for kids. But in order to gain the scale of consumer kids participation that at the end reached a record high of over 23,000 participating kids, it needed to have a high awareness and wide reach of consumer kids that only mass advertising could give in the shortest time available. So here promo was the lead variable while advertising played the support role.

The result was synergy, the total market impact of the two together was greater than the sum of the individual impact of each of the two. There’s no denying that promo alone would have worked out its own impact. The same can be said of advertising working by itself. But when the two were put together in mutually reinforcing roles, the sum was a multiplication, not a mere addition.

Consider now the case where it’s advertising that leads and promotion is support. One such case is Unilever’s fairly recent relaunch of an old 1869 petroleum jelly, Vaseline, as Vaseline Soap. It’s promising as a real challenge to P&G’s Safeguard who’s owner of the germ-free clean consumer value. This case is almost a replication of what Unilever’s Clear Shampoo did when it presented itself as a serious threat to P&G’s Head & Shoulder’s almost formidable position as the anti-dandruff shampoo.

To get soap users to act on Vaseline soap’s call to action and try the new soap, various consumer promos came into play. Here it was promo that took on the support role. Advertising led.

So we hope it’s clear to you now what we were leading up to. First, if you’re not happy with just sub-optimal sales results and you’re seeking optimality, then go for a “both this and that” strategy and pairing of advertising and promo. For optimal impact, if you promote, advertise it. And if you advertise, promote what you’re advertising. However, if your goal is just to do well and not seek the most or the best, then you can stay where you are, that is, stay married to your comfort zone, your dedication to promo alone. Needless to say, this is risking your better future.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!