I spend a lot of time thinking about consumer marketing especially in D2C (direct to consumer). Bizarrely it is one of the disciplines that everyone has an opinion on how we could improve our marketing.

I am quite dispassionate about marketing channels, activities or peoples opinions which hasn’t always been taken well by investors, boards, co-workers or marketeers. So I wanted to put down some of my guiding principles. I will start with one of my favourite guiding quotes

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

― Jim Barksdale

Its generally not very popular to base marketing decisions on data, and the rise of digital marketing has made measurement a real feature – which can enable but also paralyse people into indecision.

In the early days of Diet Chef we stumbled onto TV as a marketing channel – not because we knew anything about TV its just our large US competitor was a public company and we copied pretty much everything they did (why be original!).

TV was really new to us, but we had spent money on digital channels mainly bidding on competitive keywords for other brands in the space. This was a very effective startup strategy but it didn’t scale – we needed our competitors to spend more on marketing – and they weren’t, so we maxed this out pretty quickly. So we asked around and proposed making a TV advert, everyone instantly thought we were a really big deal – why would a business that was only 9 months old spend money on TV advertising (this was for the BIG brands).

The real reason was we were targeting a very specific demographic and ideally we wanted to target a daytime audience that had TV on in the background while doing other things. We spent £15,000 making a TV ad (here it is) and paid a lot for media – but we bought the media very effectively. We bought a daytime audience and paid around £2 per thousand people we reached (based on audience data). Today reaching similiar audiences on Facebook would cost 10-15x times this, but thats digital media inflation for you!

So I tend to assess marketing investments on the basis of the cost to reach a thousand people (CPT or CPM) when deciding an activity to do. If you follow this simple rule you can easily assess media channel choice rather than simply using opinion, it tends to lead to better disciplined decision making and better outcomes!